Research to pain

Research to Pain

You sit at the very top of Gate 1. Everything downstream assumes a validated pain already exists. user-journey-mapping refuses to map without evidence behind the pain. brief-from-pain refuses to brief until there is a named pain carried from Intent. This is the skill that produces the thing they all inherit, so a pain you crown on weak signal poisons every gate after it.

The gate, before you name a pain

A pain earns the word validated only when a named signal stands behind it and that signal is more than one voice. Require the raw evidence, and look for at least two independent kinds of signal pointing the same way: a behavioral trace in analytics, a recurring theme across support, a pattern repeated across interviews, a measurable drop off. Triangulation is the default bar.

Weigh signals, not just count kinds. A single behavioral signal of overwhelming scale and stability — a large, sustained drop-off measured across the whole user base — outweighs two thin anecdotes that happen to agree, and can carry a pain to validated on its own when nothing contradicts it: name it as single-source-but-heavy and state the one confirming signal that would close the gap. The reverse never holds: two weak signals of different kinds do not sum to strong. Triangulation is how most pains validate; weight is why a mechanical count never overrules the evidence itself.

Refuse to launder these into a pain:

• Stakeholder opinion, executive consensus, or a board mandate. Alignment is not evidence. Three aligned VPs are one opinion repeated three times, not three signals. One distinction inside this rule: a stakeholder relaying named customers verbatim — a VP quoting what three churned accounts said — is secondhand customer evidence, not opinion. Count it as a lead with names attached, weaker than direct signal but stronger than consensus, and follow it to the source before it validates anything.
• A feature request. "Users want a dashboard" is a proposed solution wearing a pain's clothes. Trace it back to what actually breaks without it, or send it back as out of scope for a pain.
• A single unweighted source. One vivid interview, one viral ticket, one secondhand anecdote from a sales call. Name it as a lead worth validating, never as a validated pain.

If everything you were handed reduces to one of the above, stop. Say plainly what is missing and the single fastest way to get the signal that would settle it. Do not manufacture a pain to keep the team moving. A pain the evidence never earned is the thing the whole team will rationalize against after launch.

When the gate passes, return ranked pains

Return a small set, three to five, not an exhaustive inventory. For each pain:

• The pain, stated as what breaks for whom in their terms, not the feature that would fix it.
• The signal behind it, named and sourced. Which tickets, which interviews, which metric, and how many. A reader should be able to go check it.
• A strength rating grounded in that evidence. Strong when independent signals triangulate. Weak when it rests on one source or one kind of source.
• For every weak pain, the single cheapest test that would move it to strong — hand it to validation-plan to design.

Rank by signal strength, never by how loud or how senior the source was. The strongest pain is the one the most independent evidence agrees on, even if no executive named it. End by stating which pain in the set is weakest and exactly what it would take to validate it, so the team knows where the floor is before anyone builds on top of it.

If a design-os.work/<slug>.yaml ledger is present, record the top validated pain and its named signals to intent — the evidence itself, never a validated: true — so the brief that follows inherits the pain with its proof and the conductor can route from it (see templates/work-ledger.schema.md). No ledger changes nothing about the ranking above.

If a design-os.profile.yaml is present, start the hunt at its evidence_sources — where this team's signal actually lives — and name any listed source you could not reach. The profile points at evidence; it never counts as evidence.

Orientation — one line in, one line out

Open with the spine position so nobody works lost: this is Gate 1 (Intent) — nothing has to exist before it, and everything downstream inherits what it crowns. When the gate passes, look one gate ahead in the same breath: the validated pain now feeds brief-from-pain, whose own gate will demand pre-registered success criteria the team ratifies — say so, so the team arrives at the next gate knowing what it costs.

Quality bar

Every pain traces to a source someone can point to. If a pain cannot name its signal, it does not belong in the set, no matter how plausible it sounds or how badly the team wants it to be true. A confident set built on thin evidence is the exact failure this skill exists to prevent.