interviews

name

interviews

description

Manages the founder's customer discovery interview lifecycle — drafting scripts tailored to a target segment, refining existing ones, managing script status, and analyzing interview transcripts to extract insights, review technique, and update hypothesis state. Use when the founder wants to prep for interviews, draft a discovery script, refine questions, change a script's status, analyze a completed interview (transcript, paste, or recollection), extract insights, or review how an interview went.

Interviews

Help the founder run the full customer discovery interview loop — from preparing a script to analyzing what was said afterward.

This skill covers two phases:

1. Script management — drafting, refining, and managing the lifecycle of reusable interview scripts.
2. Transcript analysis — after an interview has happened, extracting statements, linking them to hypotheses, reviewing the founder's interviewing technique, and recommending hypothesis state changes.

An interview script is a reusable guide, not a teleprompter: it anchors the conversation around the assumptions being tested while leaving room for the founder to follow threads that open up. Scripts are organized around topics to explore — learning themes tied to the hypotheses, risks, or decisions they probe — with a few example questions under each as starting points, not a fixed sequence. This keeps interviews free-flowing rather than survey-like. Most founders need one script for their primary segment; occasionally a second script for an adjacent segment.

Before you start

Read startup/core.md to load project context (name, seed description, and all fields under ## Core — especially Audience).

Check if startup/interview-scripts/ contains any .md files.

Scaffold the folders if they don't exist yet:

mkdir -p startup/interview-scripts
mkdir -p startup/interviews/transcripts

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When scripts already exist

Load and understand them for context. Infer intent from the conversation — don't mechanically ask "what do you want to do?" If the founder is:

• Referring to a specific script — load that file, discuss, help edit the relevant section
• Iterating after running interviews — help revise questions that didn't land, add follow-ups that proved useful, tighten or expand as needed
• Drafting a script for a different segment — start a new script (route to the reference file below if they want a guided draft, or draft directly if they know what they want)
• Changing status — read the file, propose the change, write it back
  • draft — still being shaped, not yet used
  • ready — actively in use for interviews
  • retired — superseded or no longer in rotation

When adding or updating scripts, follow the file conventions:

• YAML frontmatter with status (draft, ready, retired), length_minutes (number — 15/30/45/60), and target_persona (one-line segment descriptor)
• H1 heading: script title — segment + focus, e.g. "Freelance designers — invoice chasing"
• ## Target Persona — 2–4 sentences describing who this script is for and why
• ## Opening — what the founder says at the start: purpose, consent to record, framing
• ## Topics to Explore — the heart of the script. Leads with a short blockquote reminding the founder these are topics, not a script (depth beats coverage). Then ### topics, each with: a learning-theme heading (not a question), a **Why it matters:** line carrying [[hypothesis-slug]] backlinks plus a one-line intent, and 2–4 starting questions framed as prompts, not a checklist
• ## Closing — wrap-up, referrals ask, thank-you
• Optional ## Notes — facilitation tips for the founder

Slug convention: lowercase the title, replace spaces and non-alphanumeric characters with hyphens, collapse multiple hyphens. "Freelance designers — invoice chasing" → freelance-designers-invoice-chasing.

Legacy scripts (## Core Questions): older scripts used a rigid numbered ## Core Questions list instead of ## Topics to Explore. The validation hook will nudge when it sees one. When you load such a script, mention that the skill now drafts topic-based scripts (which tend to produce more free-flowing, higher-truth interviews) and offer to re-create it in the new shape — clustering the existing questions into topics tied to the relevant hypotheses. Don't force it: if the founder wants to keep editing the old form, do so. This is a one-time, opt-in conversion.

Read before writing, propose before saving, get confirmation.

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When the founder needs help finding people to interview

Recognize this intent when the founder says things like "I don't know who to talk to", "how do I find interviewees?", "where do I find people for discovery calls?", "I'm struggling to get anyone on a call", or similar.

Load the Layer 2 reference file that owns this workflow:

references/finding-interviewees.md

The reference file's instructions take over from this point.

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When no scripts exist

Check prerequisites:

• core.md is missing or has no Audience or similar information that provides this information under ## Core: Mention that a defined target audience sharpens the script considerably — suggest filling that in first (via the whats-next skill or directly in core.md). Do not block: if the founder wants to proceed with a rough persona, proceed.

• startup/hypotheses/ is empty or has fewer than 3 hypotheses: Mention that scripts work best when they're built around specific hypotheses to test — suggest invoking the hypotheses skill first. Do not block: if the founder insists on drafting a script now, proceed.

• Prerequisites met (or founder insists): Load the reference file for the guided script-creation conversation:

references/initial-interview-script.md

The reference file's instructions take over from this point.

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When a transcript arrives

After the founder runs an interview, they may bring back a transcript, paste text into chat, or simply recount a conversation from memory. In any of these cases, the workflow is the same: save the source material, dispatch the interview-analyst subagent, then dispatch the hypotheses-manager subagent, surface recommendations to the founder, and route confirmed hypothesis changes through the hypotheses skill.

Recognize this intent when the founder:

• Points at a transcript file under startup/interviews/transcripts/ (or similar)
• Pastes transcript-shaped text (dialogue, Q&A, long monologue) into chat
• Describes a conversation from memory ("I talked to someone at a coffee shop…", "I had a call with a designer and she said…")
• Asks to analyze, review, or extract insights from a completed interview

Load the Layer 2 reference file that owns this workflow end-to-end:

references/transcript-analysis.md

The reference file's instructions take over from this point, including the three input branches (file / pasted / recollection), dispatching both subagents, summarizing to the founder, and routing confirmed edits through the hypotheses skill.

Do not extract statements, evaluate hypothesis state, or edit hypothesis files yourself — the reference file describes how to delegate that work to the two subagents.