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. Then the learning scatters. Only the founder can read the hypothesis file. Nobody rereads the debriefs. A teammate asks, "So what did we actually find out?" This skill closes the method. It distills everything the interviews produced into one report. The report states plainly what you now know (this includes what got disproved — a disproved idea is still knowledge). It also states what you merely think, and what remains untested. Every claim carries a tag for its evidence and the customers' own words.
The report serves two kinds of readers. The top section is a summary. It keeps every important fact, but stays as short as possible, because that is all most people will read. Below it sits the full reference: numbered findings with voice-counts and exact quotes, the vocabulary bank, and briefs for each area that use the findings for the work that comes next — the ideal-customer definition (keystone and deal-breaker candidates, the inciting-event stories you actually heard), positioning (the customers' exact words, the higher-level outcome they really want), pricing, marketing and sales, and product priorities. The skill does not do that downstream work. It gives you the evidence those decisions should be made from, and it labels its own interpretations clearly 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 reads your goals, hypotheses, questions, and debriefs. It drafts the whole report — a brief summary on top, then evidence-cited findings and per-area briefs below. Then it reviews the report with you, section by section. It never states a claim stronger than the evidence supports. You end up with one document. It turns "we did a bunch of interviews" into input your whole company can act on.
One practical note: tell the skill where you are working. Name a directory, or point to your existing files, when you invoke it. The skill then keeps the method's files together in that place. If you do not say, the skill asks before it creates anything.
From the source
Two sources form the base 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." You build strategy from these facts. This skill packages exactly those facts.
- The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method — this report distills the artifacts of this method. The method explains why "no pattern" is still a finding, and why AI can summarize your thinking but cannot 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. This is the ideal-customer exercise. The report's ICP brief supplies it 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 are the raw material of strategy. The report gives evidence of what customers praise, accept, and hate. This evidence 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 details. 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 as "probably" or "most." Different people interpret probability words differently. These differences are bigger than the differences between the words themselves.
- Ignoring the Wisdom of Crowds — this explains when counts find the truth (objective facts, where errors cancel out), and when votes can only veto, not decide. The report counts voices to check facts. But it warns against averaging wants together, which produces a bland option that nobody hates.
- "It's a Balance" isn't always the answer — split evidence points to a segment or a choice, never to a mid-point. "It's a balance" is the opposite of how you should report findings.
- Specificity: A weapon of mass effectiveness — this article states the report's two-reader rule directly. When brevity is the goal, examples are extra weight. Everywhere else, examples make claims believable, hard to argue against, and easy to check.