customer-research

Closes the loop from nothing to a persona. Most persona work assumes the research already exists. This skill produces it.

The interview discipline

Mode A analyses calls that may themselves be badly run, and Mode B reads what people volunteered. Both need Rob Fitzpatrick's rules from The Mom Test (2013) applied as a filter:

1. Talk about their life, not your idea. Anything a person says about your product is a compliment or a courtesy, not data.
2. Ask about specifics in the past, never generics about the future. "What did you do the last time this happened" is evidence. "Would you use this" is noise, and should be discarded rather than coded.
3. Listen more than you talk. In a transcript, a long interviewer turn before an answer usually means the answer was led.

When coding quotes, discard anything that answers a leading or hypothetical question, and say how many you discarded. A corpus of compliments produces a persona of people who do not exist.