customer-research_skill

Overview

This skill helps teams understand customers through structured research, persona development, and journey mapping. It provides methods for collecting quantitative and qualitative evidence, translating findings into prioritized segments, jobs-to-be-done, and actionable opportunities. Use it to align product, marketing, and sales decisions with real customer needs.

How this skill works

The skill guides you to gather data from surveys, analytics, interviews, and review mining, then synthesizes that evidence into personas, JTBD statements, and journey maps. It recommends segmentation criteria and prioritization matrices to focus on the highest-impact customer groups. Outputs include ranked pain points, opportunities, and concise research summaries you can act on.

When to use it

• Validating a new product hypothesis or feature roadmap
• Building or refining user personas before design or marketing work
• Mapping the buyer journey to reduce friction and improve conversion
• Prioritizing customer segments for go-to-market and sales focus
• Analyzing churn drivers or support trends to improve retention

Best practices

• Interview actual customers plus churned customers and non-customers to avoid biased samples
• Mix quantitative signals (NPS, usage, analytics) with qualitative depth (interviews, reviews)
• Use JTBD to frame motivations; separate functional and emotional jobs
• Prioritize segments by size, need intensity, accessibility, and competition
• Translate qualitative themes into measurable metrics to track change over time

Example use cases

• Create 3-5 buyer personas for a B2B SaaS product including triggers, evaluation criteria, and timelines
• Run a 20-interview study with the included interview framework to identify top onboarding pain points
• Segment users by usage patterns and willingness to pay to inform pricing experiments
• Mine app store and forum reviews to extract repeated complaints and feature requests for the product backlog
• Map the full buyer journey to surface conversion friction and growth opportunities