Hypotheses: Your Best Guesses, Written Down to Be Tested

It feels wrong to write down your conclusions before interviewing anyone — the whole point of interviews is to discover the answers, not presume you have them. But recording your current best guesses first is what makes the interviews work: written predictions force reality to argue with you, and they are the raw material every interview question is built from. This skill facilitates that step. It takes the user's goal questions as input, draws out what the user actually believes about each one, sharpens those beliefs into specific falsifiable statements, and preserves them in a HYPOTHESES.md file that drives the rest of the interview process.

The mental model

Why write the answers before asking the questions

Two reasons, and they justify the entire step: