Interview Script

Create a structured customer interview script with JTBD probing questions, warm-up, core exploration, and wrap-up sections. Follows The Mom Test

Category: design Source: phuryn/pm-skills

What Is This?

Overview

The Interview Script skill generates structured customer interview guides built around Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) methodology and The Mom Test principles. It produces complete, ready-to-use scripts that include warm-up sections, core exploration questions, and wrap-up segments, all designed to surface genuine behavioral insights rather than polite opinions or wishful thinking.

The skill follows a disciplined approach to question design. Every question targets past behavior, avoids leading language, and steers clear of product pitching. This matters because most interview scripts inadvertently coach participants to give favorable answers. The Mom Test framework, developed by Rob Fitzpatrick, addresses this directly by anchoring every question in what people have actually done, not what they think they might do in the future.

Product managers, UX researchers, and founders use this skill to prepare for discovery interviews quickly and consistently. Rather than writing scripts from scratch before each research session, teams can generate a structured guide in seconds and spend their preparation time on context and synthesis instead.

Who Should Use This

• Product managers preparing for customer discovery sessions before defining new features or roadmaps
• UX researchers building interview guides for usability studies or generative research projects
• Startup founders conducting early-stage validation interviews with potential customers
• Customer success teams gathering structured feedback to inform retention and expansion strategies
• Designers running contextual inquiry sessions to understand user workflows and pain points
• Business analysts documenting current-state processes through stakeholder interviews

Why Use It?

Problems It Solves

• Eliminates leading questions that produce biased, unusable data by enforcing The Mom Test question structure throughout the script
• Removes the blank-page problem when preparing for research sessions, reducing script preparation time from hours to minutes
• Prevents interviewers from accidentally pitching their product during discovery conversations, which contaminates findings
• Ensures consistent interview structure across multiple researchers or sessions, making synthesis and comparison more reliable
• Addresses the common mistake of asking hypothetical questions such as "would you use this?" instead of behavioral questions grounded in past experience

Core Highlights

• Generates four distinct script sections: warm-up, context setting, core exploration, and wrap-up
• Applies JTBD probing question patterns to uncover functional, emotional, and social job dimensions
• Enforces The Mom Test rules automatically, including no leading questions and no future-hypothetical framing
• Produces follow-up probe suggestions alongside each primary question
• Includes transition language between sections to keep conversations natural
• Adapts question depth based on the research objective provided
• Outputs scripts in clean markdown format ready for direct use in Notion, Confluence, or any documentation tool

How to Use It?

Basic Usage

Invoke the skill with a clear research objective and target participant profile. The more specific the input, the more targeted the output.

/interview-script
Topic: Expense reporting workflow
Participant: Finance manager at a mid-size company
Goal: Understand current pain points before designing a new approval feature

The skill returns a complete script with timed sections, primary questions, and follow-up probes.

Specific Scenarios

Scenario 1: Early-stage startup validation. A founder wants to validate assumptions about a B2B invoicing tool. The skill generates a script focused entirely on current invoicing behavior, tools already in use, and recent frustrating experiences, with no mention of the proposed solution.

Scenario 2: Feature discovery for an existing product. A product manager needs to understand why users abandon a checkout flow. The script targets the last time the participant completed or abandoned a similar task, probing for specific moments of friction.

Real-World Examples

A research team at a SaaS company used this skill to standardize interview guides across three researchers conducting parallel sessions. The consistent structure made affinity mapping significantly faster during synthesis.

A solo founder preparing for five customer calls in one week generated five tailored scripts in under ten minutes, each adapted to a different participant segment.

When to Use It?

Use Cases

• Pre-sprint discovery interviews to validate problem assumptions before committing to a solution
• Jobs-to-be-Done research to map the full hiring and firing context around a product
• Churn interviews to understand why customers stopped using a product
• Onboarding research to identify friction in the first-use experience
• Competitive displacement interviews with users who recently switched from a rival product
• Annual voice-of-customer programs requiring consistent interview structure across large participant sets
• Stakeholder interviews during product audits or organizational research

Important Notes

Requirements

• A clearly defined research objective before invoking the skill
• A described participant profile including role, context, or behavioral segment
• Basic familiarity with interview facilitation to use the generated script effectively