pedroromeroluna ux-research — the Research Plan
Third station of the pipeline. It designs the research round that attacks the riskiest hypothesis of the Discovery Brief — never all of them at once — and closes with a Research Plan ready to pilot.
When it is invoked
| When | From / to |
|---|---|
The Market Brief from market-research already sized the market |
Entry from market-research (.claude/skills/market-research/SKILL.md) |
| The Research Plan is written | Exit toward synthetic-users (.claude/skills/synthetic-users/SKILL.md) — pilots the script before spending real fieldwork |
| With no prior Market Brief | Invocable on its own, over the loaded product node, with the Discovery Brief as the minimum input |
The interview
It is run with the pressure method of .claude/skills/grill/SKILL.md#method — cited by path, never copied —
over the choice of hypothesis, the screening criterion and every question in the guide.
One objective per round
Each round attacks a single hypothesis: the riskiest one in the Discovery Brief, the same risk ×
impact prioritization product-strategy already did. Faced with a request to "research everything
together", pressure is applied: which is the one that costs the most if it turns out wrong? That one
belongs to this round; the others wait for the next.
Screening that avoids "users in general"
The criterion for who gets interviewed is written in verifiable behavior, never in demographics alone. "Active users" is not screening; "people who bought in the last two weeks and abandoned checkout at least once" is. Faced with a criterion that is too broad ("any user of the app"), it is returned with a counter-question: what behavior must this person have done or not done for their answer to be useful?
Exploratory → qualitative; sizing → quantitative
The modality is decided by what question the round asks. If the question is "why does this happen?" or "what do people do today?", qualitative — interviews, few people, depth. If the question is "how many people does this happen to?" or "how often?", quantitative — survey, representative sample. Mixing the two without deciding which one leads produces a plan without focus; one is chosen and the reason is stated.
JTBD in four dimensions
When the round explores a job-to-be-done, the guide covers the four forces of change, not just the functional one:
| Dimension | What it looks for |
|---|---|
| Push | What about the current situation pushes toward looking for something different |
| Pull | What about the new solution attracts |
| Anxiety | What doubt or fear holds the change back |
| Habit | What about the current solution weighs by habit, even when it does not work well |
A guide that only asks about the desired feature covers one of the four and is returned incomplete.
Master technique: reconstruct the last real time
The master question of any guide is not "what do you think of X?": it is "tell me about the last time [situation]" — reconstructing step by step what happened, at what moment, with whom, what they did right before and right after. Opinion questions ("would you like it if...?") are taken out of the guide unless they serve to close the session, never to explore.
Every question tied, or it comes out
Every question in the guide is tied explicitly to a hypothesis from the Discovery Brief or to one of the four job dimensions. A question that cannot be tied to either is taken out of the guide — "just in case" is not an inclusion criterion.
The Research Plan
It closes by writing the deliverable as dated research of the loaded product node, in:
research/<YYYY-MM-DD>-research-plan.md
Dated, never overwritten. The path falls inside content: */products/*/research/*.md
line of the brain's own tree.md: no new glob and no resolver row are needed. Without a product
node, this same file — <YYYY-MM-DD>-research-plan.md — is what lands in the current folder
instead.
The Plan carries these four sections, in this order, each with its literal heading:
## Objective of the round
## Screening criterion
## Modality
## Question guide
- Objective of the round: the chosen hypothesis and why it is the riskiest.
- Screening criterion: in verifiable behavior, never demographics alone.
- Modality: qualitative or quantitative, with the question that decides it.
- Question guide: every question with the hypothesis or job dimension it is tied to.
What this deliverable does not claim
The Research Plan is the v1 guide: it has not been piloted yet. Piloting it against synthetic
personas —before spending the first minute of real fieldwork— is the job of synthetic-users,
the next station.
Destination
The skill resolves the destination before producing the deliverable, never after. Three cases, two destinations:
- A product node is loaded: the deliverable goes to
research/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<name>.mdof that node. - There is a brain, but no product node — no workspace yet, or a workspace without one: the deliverable is written to a file in the current folder.
- There is no brain at all: the deliverable is written to a file in the current folder.
With no product node, the file is written to the current folder anyway. The closing message names only the path it just wrote and stops there — that is the normal way this skill ends, not an anomaly to qualify.
This skill never asks which destination to use, and it never invents a third one.
The rest of the pack installs one skill at a time. Look at .claude/skills/ first and offer only
the ones that are not there — once per session: the first time this skill closes in the session,
never again on a later close of the same or another deliverable:
grill—npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill grillmarket-research—npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill market-researchproduct-strategy—npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill product-strategysynthetic-users—npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill synthetic-users
The whole pack at once: npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills. That command installs what the pack offers;
anything listed above it is installed by naming it.