customer-learning-notes

Customer Learning Notes

Use this skill after customer conversations to turn raw notes into team-readable

evidence. Good notes make it harder to misremember, overfit, or let one founder

become the sole source of customer truth.

Source Traceability

Primary source: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, especially chapter 8 and the

conclusion. Guidance is paraphrased for this MIT repo; authoring notes used

converted EPUB lines 3613-4445.

Signal Taxonomy

Use these labels when synthesizing notes:

| Label | Meaning |

|-------|---------|

| Pain | Problem, obstacle, annoyance, risk, or cost |

| Goal | Desired outcome, job to be done, or priority |

| Workaround | Current manual process, tool stack, hack, or substitute |

| Money | Budget, cost, value, purchase process, or decision owner |

| Person | Specific stakeholder, competitor, team, buyer, or intro lead |

| Feature | Request, buying criterion, integration need, or implementation clue |

| Emotion | Strong excitement, anger, embarrassment, fear, or skepticism |

| Follow-up | Promise, task, intro, research item, or next step |

Synthesis Workflow

1. Preserve concrete facts separately from interpretation.
2. Pull out short, useful quotes only when they are needed for traceability,

positioning, or internal alignment.

1. Tag signals using the taxonomy above.
2. Group evidence by segment, problem, workaround, budget, and commitment.
3. Identify contradictions and mixed-segment noise.
4. Update beliefs, risks, and the next three questions.
5. Recommend whether to continue, narrow the segment, ask for commitments, or

move to building/testing.

Confidence Levels

| Level | Use When |

|-------|----------|

| High | Repeated behavior from a focused segment, with concrete cost or commitment. |

| Medium | Specific evidence from a few good-fit conversations. |

| Low | One-off quotes, mixed segments, opinions, or weakly anchored claims. |

Output Format

# Customer Learning Synthesis

## Source Notes
- Conversations:
- Segment:
- Date range:

## Evidence
| Signal | Evidence | Segment | Confidence | Implication |
|--------|----------|---------|------------|-------------|

## Belief Updates
- Stronger / weaker / new / rejected:

## Decisions
- Product, segment, positioning, sales or access:

## Next 3 Questions
1. [Question]
2. [Question]
3. [Question]

Workflow

Use workflows/synthesize-conversation-notes.md when the user provides raw

notes, transcripts, call summaries, or interview excerpts.

Quality Bar

• Do not summarize notes into vibes.
• Do not let one loud quote outweigh repeated behavior from a focused segment.
• Do not mix segments without labeling them.
• Do not treat notes as useful until they have been reviewed and turned into

updated beliefs or decisions.