Customer research

customer-research

When to use

• A backlog item is fuzzy because no one has talked to a current user about the underlying job in the last quarter.
• A churn or refund spike needs a switch-event explanation, not a feature gap list.
• A product owner is about to write AC for a feature that has not been validated against a real user job.

Do NOT use for quantitative funnel diagnosis (see funnel-analysis), RICE-style ranking (see rice-prioritization), or surveying at scale — this skill is about depth-5-to-10 interviews, not statistics.

Cognition cluster

• Mental model 2 — Jobs-to-be-Done. Frames every question against the switch event: what caused the user to fire the previous solution? See docs/contracts/mental-models.md § 2.
• Mental model 3 — Pareto principle. A research week that produces 12 distinct insights is usually re-discovering the same three. See mental-models.md § 3.

Procedure

Step 0: Frame the job

1. Write one sentence: "Users hire <thing> to make progress in <situation>, when motivated by <pressure>, expecting <outcome>." If you cannot finish the sentence, the discovery slice is not yet shaped — stop and route to po-discovery.
2. Read the product slot of the context-spine (if the consumer project has filled it) for bounded scope, and the team slot for the senior PO / researcher handoff target. Skip if absent — note in the brief.
3. Identify one competing solution the user might fire. Multiple competitors per session blurs the switch event.

Step 1: Recruit the right 5–8

1. Recruit switchers (joined in last 60 days) and leavers (cancelled in last 60 days). Long-tenure power-users go in a separate bucket — they explain habits, not jobs.
2. 5 minimum, 8 maximum. Saturation hits around 6 in a tightly scoped job — the Pareto cut. Beyond 8 is research theatre.
3. Avoid friends, employees, beta-program over-talkers — selection bias is the failure mode that survives the AC.

Step 2: Run the interview

1. Open with the switch event: "Walk me through the day you decided to start using <product>." Time, place, trigger, alternative considered.
2. Past behaviour, not hypothetical. Replace "would you use" with "the last time you needed X, what did you do?".
3. Capture quotes, not summaries. Verbatim quotes survive the AC; paraphrases get re-interpreted into pre-existing beliefs.
4. Listen for the anxiety / habit pair — what they feared in switching, what habit died.

Step 3: Code the evidence

1. One quote per insight. Tag each with: switch-event, anxiety, habit, expected-outcome, unexpected-outcome.
2. An insight without a quote is a hypothesis, not a finding — mark it.
3. Frequency-rank by how many distinct interviewees touched the insight (≥ 3 is signal; 1 is anecdote).

Step 4: Hand back

1. Produce the three artifacts (see ## Output).
2. Hand the brief to the senior PO. Do not translate findings into AC inside this skill — that is refine-ticket's job.

Related Skills

WHEN to use this

• The unit of analysis is a real user's switch event.
• Discovery is fuzzy and the team is about to ship without validation.
• A retention or churn spike needs a narrative, not a metric.

WHEN NOT to use this

• Quantitative drop-off across stages — route to funnel-analysis.
• Ranking competing initiatives — route to rice-prioritization.
• Reframing a fuzzy product ask before any user contact — route to po-discovery.
• AC sharpening on an already-validated ticket — route to refine-ticket.

When the agent should load this

• "We need to talk to users before we build X."
• "Why are people churning at month 2?"
• "Run customer research on the new pricing tier."
• "I keep guessing what the user wants — let's actually ask."
• "Before refining this ticket, do we know the real job?"

Output

1. research-brief.md — frame sentence, recruit criteria, target sample, JTBD focal job, list of competing solutions in scope. Pre-interview artifact.
2. evidence-log.md — one row per insight: quote · interviewee ID · tag (switch / anxiety / habit / outcome) · frequency. Sorted by frequency descending. Verbatim only.
3. switch-event-summary.md — narrative of the dominant switch event(s) the research surfaced, with ≥ 3 supporting quotes per claim. Hand-off artifact for refine-ticket and the senior product owner persona (currently product-owner; senior persona shipping in next plate).

Gotcha

• Asking "would you use" contaminates the answer with politeness; ground every question in past behaviour.
• One articulate interviewee can swamp evidence-log. Frequency-rank by distinct people, not distinct quotes.
• Tagging too aggressively pre-interview hides surprise findings — leave room for unexpected-outcome.
• A research week without ≥ 3 disqualified hypotheses is suspect — research that confirms everything is research that asked nothing.

Do NOT

• Do NOT translate findings into acceptance criteria inside this skill — hand off to refine-ticket.
• Do NOT recruit only happy users; switchers and leavers carry the switch-event signal, satisfied users do not.
• Do NOT skip the frame sentence. An unframed interview produces 50 quotes about 8 different jobs.

Runnable example

Pricing-tier churn at month 2:

• Frame: "Customers hire <product> to make progress in <weekly reporting>, motivated by <board cadence>, expecting <one-click roll-up>."
• Recruit: 6 leavers (cancelled within 30 days of month 2), 2 switchers from competitor C.
• Interview: open with "Walk me through the day you decided to cancel." Capture verbatim.
• Output: evidence-log.md shows 5 of 8 cite the manual export step as the cancellation trigger — switch-event signal, ≥ 3 frequency. switch-event-summary.md recommends the senior PO scope a discovery slice on the export step, not the report itself.