Interview Debrief: One conversation, distilled into evidence
Turn raw notes or a transcript from one customer interview into a brief on-the-record report — concise answers mapped to your questions, plus the surprises that fit nowhere. Adapted from Chapter 10 of Hidden Multipliers: A multiplier of one's own.
- Input
- Raw material from one customer conversation — a transcript, your scribbled notes, or a voice-memo dump — plus your QUESTIONS.md.
- Output
- A brief per-person debrief file in your interviews directory: one concise answer per question asked, and an addenda of things you heard that fit no question.
What this is about
An interview you don't write down is an interview you'll misremember — confirmation bias will quietly keep the parts you liked. The book's method keeps a spreadsheet: one row per question, one column per interview. This skill is that discipline without the spreadsheet: after each conversation, it takes whatever raw material you have — a transcript, hasty notes — and distills it into a brief, structured debrief file: one concise answer per interview question (skipped honestly when you never got there), plus an addenda section for everything interesting that fit no question, which is often where the biggest learning hides.
The debrief is deliberately brief — evidence, not prose — and it accumulates: one file per conversation in a directory that becomes your record of what real customers actually said, ready to be synthesized into hypothesis updates as the interviews stack up.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-interview-debrief Here's the transcript from my call with a gym owner
this morning — file it against my QUESTIONS.md.
The skill drafts the debrief: one brief answer per question asked (verbatim phrases kept, skipped questions honestly marked), plus an addenda of everything interesting that fit no question. It asks you to fill the gaps the transcript can't supply — ambiguous readings, surprises that never made it into your notes.
One practical note: say where you're working. Name a directory (or point at your existing files) when you invoke, and the skill keeps the method's files together there — if you don't, it asks before creating anything.
From the source
Two sources form the foundation of this skill:
- As in Chapter 10 of Hidden Multipliers: A multiplier of one's own (section "Learning: Iterate the Hypotheses") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the per-interview record-keeping this skill replaces the spreadsheet with: notes next to each question, next to each hypothesis, and the instruction that straying off-script is where new learning comes from.
- The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method — the published article version of the method, including exactly where AI is sanctioned to help: cleaning up transcripts and summarizing so the thinking stays yours.