Customer Interview Synthesis

Eight interviews produce forty pages of notes and one very quotable customer. The persona that comes out of that is usually a portrait of the quotable one. Synthesis is the step that stops that: count which problems came up across people, not how many times one person said it; weight each by what it costs them; and stop interviewing when new people stop adding new problems.

This skill does the counting. You do the coding - reading the notes and tagging each thing a person said with a theme and a severity - because the judgement of what two people meant by different words is yours. The engine then tells you which themes are patterns, which are one person's afternoon, which belong to one segment, and whether to book more interviews.

When to use

The user has interview notes and needs a decision from them: which problem to position on, which persona is real, what to build, or whether to keep interviewing.

Do not use it to design the interviews or the survey; customer-survey-design does that. Do not use it for closed-lost calls; win-loss-analysis has its own coding.