Skip to content
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 can't ask a customer "What should we charge?" or "Would you buy this feature?" — the first gets a shrug and the second gets a polite "yes" that evaporates when the invoice arrives. Yet pricing, positioning, and product decisions are exactly what customer interviews are for. The way out of the paradox is the first and most-skipped step of Jason's twenty-year-honed interview method: writing down your goal questions — the questions you need answered but cannot ask directly, numbered G1, G2, … so that every hypothesis and interview question you write later traces back to one.

This skill interviews you about your business — new idea or twenty-year-old company, B2B or B2C — then works with you to forge a goal-question list tailored to your situation rather than a copy of anyone's template. When the list is sharp, it writes GOALS.md: your context in prose, then the numbered goal questions, preserved for the rest of the interview workshop.

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 resolved, presses vague goals into questions interviews can actually answer, and writes GOALS.md: your context in prose, then numbered goal questions G1, G2, …

It works just as well from the other end of the spectrum — no customers, no product, 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.

The goal list comes out completely different — the decision is "build it at all?" — so the goals aim at pain, cost, and coping behavior rather than pricing or positioning.

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 "How to Extract Insights from Customers") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the five-step interview method this skill's goal-questions step begins, including the canonical eleven-goal list for a typical B2B company and the WP Engine story of what the method unlocked.
  • The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method — the published article version of the same method: goals → hypotheses → open-ended questions → iterate → stop when it's boring.

Supporting sources each supply vocabulary or motivation behind specific goal questions: