mshadmanrahman Interview Snapshot
One interview in, one structured markdown file out. Nothing else.
This is the atomic unit of customer research. Before ever running cross-interview synthesis, every interview passes through here first. Teresa Torres calls out combining synthesis steps as her single biggest anti-pattern; this skill is the guardrail that prevents it.
When to use
- Granola just synced a discovery interview transcript into the vault
- A recorded interview was transcribed via Fireflies, Otter, etc.
- You took live interview notes and want them structured
- You are about to run discovery-process Phase 4 (synthesis) and have raw transcripts
When NOT to use
- For internal team meetings (use post-meeting skill)
- For usability tests (they need a different schema: task-by-task observations)
- For NPS surveys or quantitative survey data
- To synthesize multiple interviews at once. Never. Run this skill once per interview, THEN move to cross-interview synthesis.
The schema (five sections, in order)
1. Experience Map
A timeline of what the participant actually did. First-person, past tense, concrete. Not what they would do or what they usually do, but what happened the most recent time.
Structure:
**Trigger:** What kicked off the experience
**First action:** Literal first thing they did
**Next steps:** Ordered sequence of what followed
**Tools / people touched:** Every app, site, document, human involved
**Outcome:** Did they finish? Abandon? Partially succeed?
**Time spent:** Actual duration if available, estimate if not
2. Opportunities
Moments where the participant hit friction, confusion, frustration, or made a workaround. One bullet per opportunity. Each bullet must include a direct quote.
- **[Label]**: [One-sentence description]. "[Verbatim quote]" (timestamp if available)
An "opportunity" in Teresa's vocabulary is not a solution idea. It's a problem moment worth addressing. Do not write solution hypotheses here.
3. Quick Facts
Structured fields for later querying and segmentation.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Role | |
| Company / context | |
| Team size | |
| Tool stack | |
| Tenure in role | |
| Frequency of the experience | |
| Prior alternatives tried | |
Leave fields blank rather than guessing. Confidence ranking matters downstream.
4. Salient Quote
One verbatim quote that captures the emotional or strategic heart of the interview. 1-3 sentences. If the interview has no such quote, write "None, transcript is procedural."
This is the quote you would paste into a stakeholder presentation. Choose ruthlessly.
5. Miscellaneous
Anything that didn't fit the above but might matter later. Surprises, off-topic remarks that reveal context, observations about the participant's demeanor. Keep it short. If it's empty, write "None."
Output file
discovery/{cycle-name}/interviews/YYYY-MM-DD-{participant-first-name-lowercase}.md
Example: discovery/day90-churn/interviews/2026-04-22-maria.md
If no discovery cycle exists yet, ask for a cycle slug or default to discovery/interviews/.
Frontmatter:
---
date: 2026-04-22
participant: Maria Alonso
role: Head of Growth
company_context: B2B SaaS, Series A
project: discovery-copilot
tags: [interview, discovery, pm-pilot]
source: granola://meeting-id-or-transcript-url
synthesis_status: single-interview-complete
---
The synthesis_status: single-interview-complete line is the gate flag. The cross-interview synthesis step checks for this string before accepting the file.
Hallucination guard (required)
Teresa documented a 30% quote hallucination rate when AI synthesizes interviews. Before delivering the Interview Snapshot, run this check:
- For every direct quote in the output, grep the source transcript for at least 60% of the words (exact match, case-insensitive).
- If the match fails, flag the quote with
[UNVERIFIED - edit before citing]and keep going. - Never silently fix a quote you cannot match. Mark it, move on.
Integration with other skills
- Upstream:
/pm-discovery:product-discovery interviewdesigns the questions before the interview happens. Any transcript source works: Granola, Fireflies, Otter, or hand-typed notes. - Downstream:
/pm-core:synthesize-interviewsreads all snapshots taggedsynthesis_status: single-interview-completefrom the folder, not the raw transcripts. Run this skill once per interview first. - Never: do not hand raw transcripts straight to a cross-interview synthesis step. That is the anti-pattern this skill exists to prevent.
Source
Teresa Torres, Product Talk. See: