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Skills from A Smart Bear

Goal Questions: What you want to know, but cannot ask directly

Turn "we should talk to customers" into a numbered list of goal questions — the unaskable questions (price, positioning, what to build) your interviews will be designed to answer. Adapted from Chapter 10 of Hidden Multipliers: A multiplier of one's own.

Input
Your business — new idea or existing company — and the decisions you want customer interviews to settle.
Output
A GOALS.md file: your context in prose, then numbered goal questions (G1, G2, …) your interviews must answer.

What this is about

You cannot ask a customer "What should we charge?" The customer will only shrug. You cannot ask "Would you buy this feature?" The customer will give a polite "yes." That "yes" disappears when the invoice arrives. But pricing, positioning, and product decisions are exactly what customer interviews must answer. Jason's interview method solves this problem. He refined it over twenty years. Its first step is also the step most people skip: write down your goal questions. These are the questions you need answered but cannot ask directly. Number them G1, G2, and so on. Every hypothesis and interview question you write later must trace back to one goal question.

This skill interviews you about your business. Your business can be a new idea or a company twenty years old. It can be B2B or B2C. The skill then works with you to build a goal-question list for your situation. It does not copy anyone's template. When the list is sharp, the skill writes GOALS.md. GOALS.md holds your context in prose, then the numbered goal questions. The interview workshop uses this file in its later steps.

Example invocation

You can invoke the skill like this:

/asb-interview-goals We run a four-year-old B2B SaaS for property managers,
about $40k MRR, mostly small firms. Growth stalled this year. We're debating
a price increase and whether to move upmarket, and honestly we've never done
real customer interviews.

The skill interviews you about the decisions you need to resolve. It turns vague goals into questions your interviews can actually answer. Then it writes GOALS.md: your context in prose, then numbered goal questions G1, G2, and so on.

The skill also works when you have no customers and no product yet, just an idea to validate:

/asb-interview-goals My startup idea is an AI-powered phone system for
plumbers, to schedule appointments or diagnose simple issues while the
plumber is busy. Solo operators. Validating before I build anything.

This goal list looks completely different. The decision here is "build it at all?" So the goals target pain, cost, and coping behavior, not pricing or positioning.

One practical note: tell the skill where you are working. Name a directory, or point to your existing files, when you invoke the skill. The skill then keeps the method's files together in that location. If you do not name a location, the skill asks before it creates anything.

From the source

This skill is based on two sources:

  • As in Chapter 10 of Hidden Multipliers: A multiplier of one's own (section "How to Extract Insights from Customers") — hiddenmultipliers.com — describes the five-step interview method. This skill performs its first step: goal questions. The chapter gives the standard eleven-goal list for a typical B2B company. It also tells the WP Engine story, which shows what the method achieved.
  • The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method — the published article that describes the same method: goals, then hypotheses, then open-ended questions, then iterate, then stop when it gets boring.

These sources give words and reasons for specific goal questions: