Skip to content
Skills from A Smart Bear

Customer Interviews

The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method

Six skills, run in sequence, that turn customer conversations into decisions you can defend — what to build, who for, what to charge, and how to say it. Adapted from The Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method.

What this is about

Most customer interviews waste time. People have undirected conversations and ask leading questions. These confirm what you wish were true. They do not show what is actually true. This workshop gives you a better method. Jason Cohen built this method over twenty years. He used it to validate whole startups, including WP Engine. He also used it to find small features that people will pay for. This is the "How to Extract Insights from Customers" procedure. It comes from A multiplier of one's own, the final chapter of Hidden Multipliers. It is also the published Iterative-Hypothesis customer development method.

The method rests on one insight: you cannot ask customers what you actually need to know. Do not ask "What should we charge?" You will get a shrug. Do not ask "Would you buy this feature?" You will get a polite "yes." That "yes" disappears when the invoice arrives. Instead, decide in private what you need to learn. Write down what you already believe. Then design open-ended questions. These questions let customers describe their world. You draw the conclusions. Do this across enough conversations. Clear patterns will emerge — the real prices, the real objections, the real words.

The six skills below make up that method. They are steps. Run them in order. Each step produces a file. The next step uses that file. This way the work builds up. It does not scatter across notebooks and memory.

How to run it

  1. Set the goals. Start with Goal Questions. These are the questions you cannot ask directly — price, positioning, ideal customer, what to build. Your interviews must answer them. This step writes GOALS.md. Every later step uses this file.
  2. Write down what you believe. Feed those goals to Hypotheses. This skill records your current best guesses. It writes them as numbered, testable statements in HYPOTHESES.md. Write your predictions before you test them. This helps you learn fast. It stops you from rationalizing whatever you hear.
  3. Turn hypotheses into questions. Interview Questions converts each hypothesis into an open-ended question. Each question tests the hypothesis. It does not lead the witness. This step produces QUESTIONS.md, your interview script.
  4. Interview a customer, then file it. After each conversation, run Interview Debrief. It distills the transcript or your notes into one short record per person. The record maps to your questions. It keeps surprises in the customer's own words.
  5. Let the interviews change your beliefs. Once you have a few debriefs, Learning reads them against your hypotheses. It proposes updates one at a time. It may confirm, overturn, refine, or add a new hypothesis, plus the question to test it. Then go back to step 4 and interview more people.

Repeat steps 4 and 5 until it gets boring. There is no fixed number of interviews. Ten interviews validated some ideas. WP Engine needed forty. Watch for a sign: you keep hearing the same stories, the same numbers, and the same words. When the surprises stop, the learning has stopped. That is the signal to stop gathering data and start deciding.

What you get at the end

When the interviews are done, run Interview Report. It distills everything — goals, hypotheses, questions, and all the debriefs — into one file, FINAL-REPORT.md. This file has a brief summary that anyone on the team will read. It also has numbered findings, each backed by evidence, plus short briefs for each area: ideal-customer, positioning, pricing, marketing, and product. This report gives you the validated facts. You build your next round of decisions on these facts.

The files, at a glance

The sequence is a chain of files. Each step hands its file to the next step:

GOALS.md → HYPOTHESES.md → QUESTIONS.md → a growing folder of per-interview debriefs → (Learning updates the hypotheses and questions in place, again and again) → FINAL-REPORT.md.

The steps

This workshop runs several skills in sequence, and some rely on others (like asb-rude-qa) — install the whole set before you begin: run npx skills add asmartbear/asb-skills, or ↓ download all skills as one ZIP. More install options →

  1. Goal Questions

    Defines what your interviews must answer.

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

    asb-interview-goals

  2. Hypotheses

    Turns your assumptions into testable bets.

    Your GOALS.md goal questions, plus what you currently believe about customers, pain, price, and competition. A HYPOTHESES.md file: numbered, falsifiable hypotheses (H1, H2, …), each mapped to the goal questions it addresses.

    asb-interview-hypotheses

  3. Interview Questions

    Forges unbiased questions from your hypotheses.

    A HYPOTHESES.md file — or a single hypothesis you want to test in an interview. A QUESTIONS.md of numbered questions in interview order, each mapped to the hypotheses it tests (single-hypothesis mode: the final question, in chat).

    asb-interview-questions

  4. Interview Debrief

    Distills one interview into structured evidence.

    Raw material from one customer conversation — a transcript, your scribbled notes, or a voice-memo dump — plus your QUESTIONS.md. 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.

    asb-interview-debrief

  5. Learning

    Turns interview patterns into hypothesis updates.

    Your GOALS.md, HYPOTHESES.md, and QUESTIONS.md, plus a directory of per-interview debrief files. Your working files updated one agreed change at a time — plus tentative observations worth watching and a read on whether it's time to stop interviewing.

    asb-interview-learning

  6. Interview Report

    Distills your interviews into usable truth.

    Your GOALS.md, HYPOTHESES.md, and QUESTIONS.md, plus the directory of per-interview debrief files. 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.

    asb-interview-report