Interview Report: What you know, what you think, and what to do with it
Turn a finished round of customer interviews into one findings report — validated truths, working theories, and open questions — ready to drive positioning, ideal-customer, pricing, and product decisions. Adapted from Chapter 10 of Hidden Multipliers: A multiplier of one's own.
- Input
- Your GOALS.md, HYPOTHESES.md, and QUESTIONS.md, plus the directory of per-interview debrief files.
- Output
- A FINAL-REPORT.md: a brief top summary humans will actually read, backed by numbered, evidence-cited findings and per-area briefs for ICP, positioning, pricing, marketing & sales, and product.
What this is about
Interviews end, and the learning scatters — a hypothesis file only the founder can decode, debriefs nobody rereads, and a teammate asking "so what did we actually find out?" This skill closes the method: it distills everything the interviews produced into one report that says plainly what you now know (including what got disproved — negative knowledge is knowledge), what you merely think, and what remains untested — every claim tagged with its evidence and the customers' own words.
The report is built for two readers at once. The top is a summary as brief as possible without losing anything salient, because that's all most humans will read. Below it sits the full reference: numbered findings with voice-counts and verbatim quotes, the vocabulary bank, and per-area briefs that marshal the findings for the work that comes next — defining your ideal customer (keystone and deal-breaker candidates, the inciting-event stories you actually heard), positioning (their exact words, the higher-level outcome they're really buying), pricing, marketing and sales, and product priorities. The skill doesn't do that downstream work — it delivers the evidence those decisions should be made from, with any of its own interpretations clearly labeled as interpretation.
Example invocation
You can invoke the skill like this:
/asb-interview-report We've finished the interview round — twelve
debriefs in interviews/, hypotheses all synthesized. Write up what we
found so I can share it with my cofounder and our designer.
The skill sweeps your goals, hypotheses, questions, and debriefs, drafts the whole report — brief summary on top, evidence-cited findings and per-area briefs below — and then reviews it with you section by section, refusing to state anything stronger than the evidence supports. You walk away with the one document that turns "we did a bunch of interviews" into input your whole company can act on.
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 "Deciding What to Do: Combining Customer Insights with Multipliers") — hiddenmultipliers.com — the report is the bridge this chapter describes: validated hypotheses are "the facts of the matter" that strategy gets built from, and this skill packages exactly those facts.
- The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method — the method whose artifacts this report distills, including why "no pattern" is still a finding and why AI may summarize your thinking but not replace it.
Supporting chapters define what the report's downstream briefs must feed:
- As in Chapter 3 of Hidden Multipliers: Speaking Carol Into Existence — hiddenmultipliers.com — keystones, deal-breakers, and inciting events: the ideal-customer exercise this report's ICP brief supplies with interview evidence, including the trigger stories the chapter says to collect by interviewing.
- As in Chapter 2 of Hidden Multipliers: Carol Loves You for You — hiddenmultipliers.com — strengths and weaknesses as the raw material of strategy; the report's evidence of what customers praise, tolerate, and abhor feeds that classification.
- As in Chapter 4 of Hidden Multipliers: A Rose by Any Other Name — hiddenmultipliers.com — positioning built from customers' exact words, the Needs Stack, and vivid specifics: the report's vocabulary bank and positioning brief exist to supply them.
- For probabilities, use Fermi numbers, not words — why findings state their strength as "7 of 9," never "probably" or "most": individual interpretations of probability words differ more than the words themselves.
- Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds — when tallies find truth (objective facts, where errors cancel) and when votes only veto — why the report counts voices to validate facts but warns against averaging desires into the bland thing nobody hated.
- "It's a Balance" isn't always the answer — split evidence is a segment or a choice, never a mid-point: "it's a balance" is the exact opposite of how findings should be reported.
- Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness — the report's two-reader rule in article form: when brevity is the goal examples are bloat, and everywhere else examples are what make claims believable, hard to counter, and researchable.