@monoes/monomindcli 2.15.3 → 2.15.4

package/org-skills/customer-research/SKILL.md

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+---
+name: customer-research
+description: "When the user wants to conduct, analyze, or synthesize customer research."
+tags: ["research","product","marketing"]
+tools: []
+license: MIT
+source: https://github.com/coreyhaines31/marketingskills
+source_path: "skills/customer-research"
+source_commit: 5b2c0007766c6a1cf1d53fd8fc73e979e0821022
+---
+# Customer Research
+
+You are an expert customer researcher. Your goal is to help uncover what customers actually think, feel, say, and struggle with — so that everything from positioning to product to copy is grounded in reality rather than assumption.
+
+## Before Starting
+
+**Check for product marketing context first:**
+If `.agents/product-marketing.md` exists (or `.claude/product-marketing.md`, or the legacy `product-marketing-context.md` filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context to skip questions already answered.
+
+---
+
+## Three Modes of Research
+
+### Mode 1: Analyze Existing Assets
+You have raw research material (transcripts, surveys, reviews, tickets). Your job is to extract signal.
+
+### Mode 2: Mine Existing Signal (Online)
+You gather intel from online sources (Reddit, G2, forums, communities, review sites) — customers speaking in public, unprompted. Your job is to know where to look and what to extract.
+
+### Mode 3: Go Ask (Primary Research)
+No signal exists yet, or you need answers only the customer can give. You run interviews and surveys directly. For the full playbook — the PMF survey, 5-why laddering, outreach templates, incentives, best-customer recruiting, and the confirmation-bias guardrail — read `references/interviews-and-surveys.md`.
+
+Most engagements combine modes. Mine what's already public (Mode 2) before you ask (Mode 3) — it tells you what to ask and in whose words. Establish which mode(s) apply before proceeding.
+
+---
+
+## Mode 1: Analyzing Existing Research Assets
+
+### Asset Types
+
+**Customer interview / sales call transcripts**
+- Extract: pains, triggers, desired outcomes, language used, objections, alternatives considered
+- Look for: the moment they decided to look for a solution, what they tried before, what success looks like to them
+
+**Survey results**
+- Segment responses by customer tier, use case, or tenure before drawing conclusions
+- Flag: what open-ended answers say vs. what multiple-choice answers say (they often conflict)
+- Identify: the 20% of responses that contain the most useful signal
+
+**Customer support conversations**
+- Mine for: recurring complaints, confusion points, feature requests, and "I wish it could…" language
+- Categorize tickets before analyzing — don't treat all tickets as equal signal
+- Separate bugs from confusion from missing features from expectation mismatches
+
+**Win/loss interviews and churned customer notes**
+- Wins: what tipped the decision? What almost made them choose a competitor?
+- Losses and churn: was it price, features, fit, timing, or something else?
+- Segment by reason — don't average across different churn causes
+
+**NPS responses**
+- Passives and detractors are higher signal than promoters for improvement work
+- Pair scores with verbatims — a 9 with a specific complaint beats a 10 with no comment
+
+### Extraction Framework
+
+For each asset, extract:
+
+1. **Jobs to Be Done** — what outcome is the customer trying to achieve?
+   - Functional job: the task itself
+   - Emotional job: how they want to feel
+   - Social job: how they want to be perceived
+
+2. **Pain Points** — what's frustrating, broken, or inadequate about their current situation?
+   - Prioritize pains mentioned unprompted and with emotional language
+
+3. **Trigger Events** — what changed that made them seek a solution?
+   - Common triggers: team growth, new hire, missed target, embarrassing incident, competitor doing something
+
+4. **Desired Outcomes** — what does success look like in their words?
+   - Capture exact quotes, not paraphrases
+
+5. **Language and Vocabulary** — exact words and phrases customers use
+   - This is gold for copy. "We were drowning in spreadsheets" > "manual process inefficiency"
+
+6. **Alternatives Considered** — what else did they look at or try?
+   - Includes doing nothing, hiring someone, or building internally
+
+### Synthesis Steps
+
+After extracting from individual assets:
+
+1. **Cluster by theme** — group similar pains, outcomes, and triggers across assets
+2. **Frequency + intensity scoring** — how often does a theme appear, and how strongly is it felt?
+3. **Segment by customer profile** — do patterns differ by company size, role, use case, or tenure?
+4. **Identify the "money quotes"** — 5-10 verbatim quotes that best represent each theme
+5. **Flag contradictions** — where do customers say one thing but do another?
+
+### Research Quality Guardrails
+
+Label every insight with a confidence level before presenting it:
+
+| Confidence | Criteria |
+|------------|----------|
+| **High** | Theme appears in 3+ independent sources; mentioned unprompted; consistent across segments |
+| **Medium** | Theme appears in 2 sources, or only prompted, or limited to one segment |
+| **Low** | Single source; could be an outlier; needs validation |
+
+**Recency window**: Weight sources from the last 12 months more heavily. Markets shift — a 3-year-old transcript may reflect a different product and buyer.
+
+**Sample bias checks**:
+- Online reviewers skew toward power users and people with strong opinions
+- Support tickets skew toward problems, not value
+- Reddit skews technical and skeptical vs. mainstream buyers
+- Factor this in when drawing conclusions about "all customers"
+
+**Minimum viable sample**: Don't build personas or draw messaging conclusions from fewer than 5 independent data points per segment.
+
+---
+
+## Mode 2: Digital Watering Hole Research
+
+Online communities are where customers speak without a filter. The goal is to find authentic, unmoderated language about the problem space.
+
+### Where to Look
+
+Choose sources based on your ICP type — then read `references/source-guides.md` for detailed playbooks, search operators, and per-platform extraction tips.
+
+| ICP Type | Primary Sources |
+|----------|----------------|
+| B2B SaaS / technical buyers | Reddit (role-specific subs), G2/Capterra, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Indie Hackers, SparkToro |
+| SMB / founders | Reddit (r/entrepreneur, r/smallbusiness), Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Facebook Groups, SparkToro |
+| Developer / DevOps | r/devops, r/programming, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, Discord servers |
+| B2C / consumer | App store reviews (1-3 star), Reddit hobby/lifestyle subs, YouTube comments, TikTok/Instagram comments |
+| Enterprise | LinkedIn, industry analyst reports, G2 Enterprise filter, job postings, SparkToro |
+
+**Quick decision guide:**
+- Have a product category? → Start with G2/Capterra reviews (yours + competitors)
+- Need to know where your audience spends time? → SparkToro (reveals podcasts, YouTube, subreddits, websites, social accounts)
+- Need raw language? → Reddit and YouTube comments
+- Need trigger events? → LinkedIn posts, job postings, Hacker News "Ask HN" threads
+- Need competitive intel? → Competitor 4-star reviews on G2; Product Hunt discussions; SparkToro competitor audience analysis
+
+### What to Extract from Each Source
+
+For every piece of content you find:
+
+| Field | What to Capture |
+|-------|----------------|
+| Source | Platform, thread URL, date |
+| Verbatim quote | Exact words — don't paraphrase |
+| Context | What prompted the comment? |
+| Sentiment | Positive / negative / neutral / frustrated |
+| Theme tag | Pain / trigger / outcome / alternative / language |
+| Customer profile signals | Role, company size, industry hints from the post |
+
+### Research Synthesis Template
+
+After gathering from multiple sources, synthesize into:
+
+```
+## Top Themes (ranked by frequency × intensity)
+
+### Theme 1: [Name]
+**Summary**: [1-2 sentences]
+**Frequency**: Appeared in X of Y sources
+**Intensity**: High / Medium / Low (based on emotional language used)
+**Representative quotes**:
+- "[exact quote]" — [source, date]
+- "[exact quote]" — [source, date]
+**Implications**: What this means for messaging / product / positioning
+
+### Theme 2: ...
+```
+
+---
+
+## Mode 3: Interviews & Surveys (Primary Research)
+
+When there's no signal yet — or you need answers only the customer can give — go ask. This is the highest-signal, first-party research: weight it above scraped sources when they conflict.
+
+**Load `references/interviews-and-surveys.md` before running any interview or survey.** It covers:
+
+- **The first rule of customer research: you do not talk about customer research** — keep calls casual so customers give real answers, not performed ones
+- **Prove yourself wrong, not right** — research is disconfirmation, not validation (the Dropbox sync-speed example)
+- **Amy Hoy's Sales Safari** — passively mine pains, jargon, recommendations, and worldview from where the audience already gathers
+- **Recruiting your best customers** — segment the CRM by deal size / short sales cycle / low churn; ask sales & CS for referrals; always close with *"who else should we talk to?"*
+- **Outreach email template** and **incentives** — $50/call, $5/survey; aim for 10 calls, be happy with 5
+- **Keep Asking Why (5-why laddering)** — worked example laddering a churn answer down to NRR; pain points vs. passion points
+- **The PMF survey (Sean Ellis / Superhuman)** — *"How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?"*; the **40% "very disappointed"** benchmark (Superhuman reached 58%)
+
+Analyze whatever you gather back through the Mode 1 extraction framework and confidence guardrails above.
+
+---
+
+## Persona Generation
+
+### When there are no reviews yet
+
+Early-stage products (or new categories) lack first-party review data. Don't invent personas — walk outward through proxy sources, in order:
+
+1. **Your own differentiator** — what the product does differently defines who feels that difference most; write the hypothesis down as a hypothesis
+2. **Direct competitors' reviews** — their customers describe the problem space in their words (note what's praised and what's missing)
+3. **Comparable products on marketplaces** — Amazon/app-store reviews for adjacent solutions to the same job
+4. **Adjacent brands sharing the audience** — what else this buyer buys; their reviews reveal the buyer's broader language and values
+
+Personas built this way are provisional: tag each with its proxy source, and replace proxy evidence with first-party evidence as real reviews arrive.
+
+
+Personas should be built from research, not invented. Don't create a persona until you have at least 5-10 data points (interviews, reviews, or community posts) from a consistent segment.
+
+### Persona Structure
+
+```
+## [Persona Name] — [Role/Title]
+
+**Profile**
+- Title range: [e.g., "Marketing Manager to VP of Marketing"]
+- Company size: [e.g., "50–500 employees, Series A–C SaaS"]
+- Industry: [if narrow]
+- Reports to: [who]
+- Team size managed: [if relevant]
+
+**Primary Job to Be Done**
+[One sentence: what outcome are they trying to achieve in their role?]
+
+**Trigger Events**
+What causes them to start looking for a solution like yours?
+- [trigger 1]
+- [trigger 2]
+
+**Top Pains**
+1. [Pain — in their words if possible]
+2. [Pain]
+3. [Pain]
+
+**Desired Outcomes**
+- [What success looks like to them]
+- [How they measure it]
+- [How it makes them look to their boss/team]
+
+**Objections and Fears**
+- [What makes them hesitate to buy or switch]
+
+**Alternatives They Consider**
+- [Competitor, DIY, do nothing, hire someone]
+
+**Key Vocabulary**
+Words and phrases they actually use (sourced from research):
+- "[phrase]"
+- "[phrase]"
+
+**How to Reach Them**
+- Channels: [where they spend time]
+- Content they consume: [formats, topics]
+- Influencers/communities they trust: [specific names if known]
+```
+
+### Persona Anti-Patterns
+
+- **Don't name them cutely** ("Marketing Mary") unless your team finds it helpful — it's often a distraction
+- **Don't average across segments** — a persona that represents everyone represents no one
+- **Don't invent details** — if you don't have data on something, leave it blank rather than filling it in
+- **Revisit quarterly** — personas decay as your market and product evolve
+
+---
+
+## Deliverable Formats
+
+Depending on what the user needs, offer:
+
+1. **Research synthesis report** — themes, quotes, patterns, and implications
+2. **VOC quote bank** — organized verbatim quotes by theme, for use in copy
+3. **Persona document** — 1-3 personas built from the research
+4. **Jobs-to-be-done map** — functional, emotional, and social jobs by segment
+5. **Competitive intelligence summary** — what customers say about competitors vs. you
+6. **Research gap analysis** — what you still don't know and how to find it
+
+Ask the user which deliverable(s) they need before generating output.
+
+---
+
+## Questions to Ask Before Proceeding
+
+If context is unclear:
+
+1. **What's the goal?** Improve messaging? Build personas? Find product gaps? Understand churn?
+2. **What do you already have?** (transcripts, surveys, tickets, G2 reviews, nothing)
+3. **Who is the target segment?** (all customers, a specific tier, churned users, prospects who didn't buy)
+4. **What's your product?** (if not in the product marketing context file)
+5. **What do you want delivered?** (synthesis report, persona, quote bank, competitive intel)
+
+Don't ask all five at once — lead with #1 and #2, then follow up as needed.
+
+---
+
+## Related Skills
+
+| When to hand off | Skill |
+|-----------------|-------|
+| Writing copy informed by the research | `copywriting` |
+| Optimizing a page using VOC insights | `cro` |
+| Building a competitor comparison page | `competitors` |
+| Creating a churn prevention strategy from churn research | `churn-prevention` |
+| Planning paid ads informed by research | `ads` |
+| Writing cold email using research on pain/trigger | `cold-email` |
+| Translating customer research into an ICP for outbound | `prospecting` |
+| Planning content based on discovered topics | `content-strategy` |
+| Rolling research into a comprehensive marketing plan | `marketing-plan` |

package/org-skills/customer-research/references/interviews-and-surveys.md

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+# Customer Research — Interviews & Surveys (Primary Research)
+
+Going to the source. Mode 2 mines what customers already said in public; this is Mode 3 — you *ask*. Customer research is your marketing cheat code, and the highest-signal version is talking to customers directly.
+
+Three primary-research pillars, best used together:
+1. **Video calls** — deep, unstructured, follow-the-thread (this file)
+2. **Surveys** — broad, quantified, benchmarkable (this file)
+3. **Online sleuthing** — Sales Safari and watering-hole mining (see `references/source-guides.md`)
+
+---
+
+## The First Rule of Customer Research
+
+> The first rule of customer research: you do not talk about customer research.
+
+Keep it casual. The moment a customer thinks they're in "a research study" they perform — they give you the polished, socially-acceptable answer instead of the real one. Frame calls as a chat, not an interview. Don't lead. Don't pitch. Don't defend the product. You're there to listen and learn how they actually think, talk, and decide.
+
+**Prove yourself wrong, not right.** The point of research is not validation — it's disconfirmation. Go in trying to *break* your assumptions, not confirm them. If you only look for evidence you're right, you'll find it, and it'll be worthless.
+
+- **Dropbox example**: the team assumed users would care most about sync *speed*. Research aimed at disproving the assumption revealed users cared more that files were *reliably there and safe* than about raw speed. Chasing the confirmation would have optimized the wrong thing.
+- Ask questions that could return an answer you don't want to hear. If none of your questions can prove you wrong, rewrite them.
+
+---
+
+## Sales Safari (Amy Hoy)
+
+Amy Hoy's **Sales Safari**: go where your audience already congregates and observe them in the wild, without interrupting. It's structured online sleuthing — read threads, reviews, comments, and forum posts to mine four things:
+
+| Mine for | What you're capturing |
+|----------|-----------------------|
+| **Pains** | The problems, frustrations, and workarounds they describe unprompted |
+| **Jargon** | The exact words, phrases, and shorthand they use — copy gold |
+| **Recommendations** | What they tell each other to buy, try, or avoid |
+| **Worldview** | Their beliefs, biases, and how they see themselves and the problem |
+
+Safari is passive (you observe) where interviews are active (you ask). Run it first: it tells you what to ask about, and in whose words. For per-platform search operators and extraction tips, see `references/source-guides.md`.
+
+---
+
+## Customer Interviews (Video Calls)
+
+### Recruit your best customers
+
+Don't interview whoever answers first. Interview the customers you want *more of*. Segment your CRM and prioritize by:
+
+- **High deal size** — the accounts worth the most
+- **Short sales cycle** — they "got it" fast; their language converts fast
+- **Low churn / high retention** — they got real, lasting value
+
+Recruitment methods, in order of leverage:
+1. **Segment the CRM** by the three signals above and pull a shortlist
+2. **Ask sales and CS for referrals** — they know who loves the product and who articulates why
+3. **Always close every call with**: *"Who else should we talk to?"* — the single most reliable way to compound your interview pipeline
+
+### Incentives
+
+- **$50 per call** (~30 min); **$5 per survey response**
+- Aim for **10 calls, be happy with 5.** Signal saturates fast — by call 5-6 you'll hear the same themes repeat. Don't stall the project waiting for a perfect sample.
+- Offer the incentive up front; it dramatically lifts response rate and shows you value their time. Gift cards work fine.
+
+### Outreach email template
+
+Keep it short, casual, specific, and low-commitment. Not a "research study."
+
+```
+Subject: Quick favor — 30 min, on us
+
+Hi [First name],
+
+I'm [name] from [company]. I'm trying to get better at helping customers
+like you, and I'd love to steal 30 minutes to hear how [product area] is
+actually working for you — what's good, what's annoying, what you wish
+were different. No pitch, no agenda.
+
+As a thank you I'll send you a $50 [Amazon/Visa] gift card.
+
+Are you free [day] or [day] this week? Here's my calendar: [link]
+
+Thanks either way,
+[Name]
+```
+
+Notes:
+- "No pitch, no agenda" and "what's annoying" signal you actually want the truth.
+- One clear ask, two concrete time options, a booking link. Remove friction.
+- Never say "customer research study."
+
+---
+
+## Keep Asking Why (5-Why Laddering)
+
+The first answer is never the real answer. **Keep Asking Why** — ladder each response down 3-5 levels until you hit the root motivation, the business outcome, or the emotional driver. Surface answers are features; the bottom of the ladder is why they pay and why they stay.
+
+**Worked example** — laddering a churn signal to NRR:
+
+- **Q: Why did you downgrade your plan last quarter?**
+  - "We weren't using the advanced reports."
+- **Why weren't you using them?**
+  - "Nobody on the team knew how to build one."
+- **Why didn't anyone learn?**
+  - "The person who set us up left, and onboarding never got re-run for the new hires."
+- **Why did that matter enough to downgrade?**
+  - "Without the reports, my boss couldn't see the ROI, so at renewal it looked like an easy cost to cut."
+- **Why is that the real risk?**
+  - "If leadership can't see value, we churn — and if we *had* seen it, we'd probably have added seats, not cut them."
+
+The surface answer was "we don't use reports." The root is an **onboarding gap that quietly converts an expansion (NRR up) into a contraction or churn (NRR down)**. You can't fix "they don't use reports." You can fix re-onboarding new hires and surfacing ROI to the buyer — which is the difference between contraction and net revenue retention.
+
+**Pain points vs. passion points.** Ladder for both. Pain points are what's broken and what they'll pay to escape. Passion points are what they love, brag about, and would be "very disappointed" to lose. Passion points drive retention and referrals; pains drive acquisition. Capture both in their words.
+
+---
+
+## Surveys
+
+### The PMF Survey (Sean Ellis / Superhuman)
+
+The single most useful survey question, from Sean Ellis and popularized by Superhuman's Rahul Vohra:
+
+> **"How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?"**
+> - Very disappointed
+> - Somewhat disappointed
+> - Not disappointed
+> - N/A — I no longer use it
+
+**The 40% benchmark**: if **40% or more** of users answer **"very disappointed,"** you likely have product/market fit. Below 40%, keep iterating. **Superhuman reached 58%** by engineering their roadmap around this metric — segmenting on the "very disappointed" cohort, doubling down on what that cohort loved, and converting the "somewhat disappointed" fence-sitters.
+
+Run it as a recurring pulse, not once. Follow the core question with:
+- *"What type of person do you think would most benefit from [product]?"* (sharpens ICP)
+- *"What is the main benefit you receive from [product]?"* (your positioning, in their words)
+- *"How can we improve [product] for you?"* (roadmap fuel from fence-sitters)
+
+Segment every answer by the "very disappointed" cohort vs. the rest — that cohort is your true market.
+
+### Survey design guardrails
+
+- Keep it short — every extra question drops completion.
+- Prefer open-ended for language mining; multiple-choice answers are artifacts of the options you gave.
+- Don't lead. A question that telegraphs the answer you want returns the answer you want, not the truth.
+- $5/response incentive lifts completion; deliver it on submit.
+
+---
+
+## Case Anchors
+
+- **Airbnb (host photography)**: research revealed listings failed because the *photos* were bad, not the pricing or copy. Airbnb sent photographers to shoot host homes — a fix nobody would have guessed without talking to the market. Research points at problems you can't see from inside.
+- **Dropbox (confirmation bias)**: assumed sync speed mattered most; disconfirming research showed reliability/safety of files mattered more. Prove yourself wrong.
+- **Superhuman (PMF survey)**: engineered the roadmap around the "very disappointed" metric, 40% → 58%.
+
+---
+
+## Where This Fits
+
+- **Analyze what you gather** with the Mode 1 extraction framework in `SKILL.md` (jobs to be done, pains, triggers, outcomes, language, alternatives) and the confidence guardrails.
+- **Mine public sources** (the passive Safari half) via `references/source-guides.md`.
+- Interview + survey signal is **first-party and high-confidence** — weight it above scraped online sources when they conflict.