user-interview

user-interview is a skill for Claude Code from assimovt/productskills. It costs 55 tokens per session (822 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for conducting customer interviews that uncover real past problems instead of hypothetical opinions about a product idea.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare interview questions and customer-discovery sessions based on The Mom Test and YC's Five Questions.
Why use it?
It reduces misleading answers by focusing on what people recently did, why it was difficult, and which workarounds they tried.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the product-skills plugin — 16 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to prepare interview questions and customer-discovery sessions based on The Mom Test and YC's Five Questions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add assimovt/productskills --skill user-interview
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/assimovt/productskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install product-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for user-interview

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for user-interview

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/assimovt/productskills/user-interview.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 822 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00055 $0.00822
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00411
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00164
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00082

Measured 10d ago against content hash 7b5bbf151147, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

user-interview scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/user-interview/SKILL.md · 68 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Run user interviews that surface real problems, not polite lies. Most interviews fail because the interviewer pitches their idea and asks "would you use this?" The Mom Test (Rob Fitzpatrick) fixes this: talk about their life, not your idea.

The Five Questions (Eric Migicovsky, YC)

Use these as the backbone of every interview. They work in order — each question digs deeper.

  1. What's the hardest part about [doing the thing you're exploring]? Opens with their pain, not your solution.

  2. Tell me about the last time you encountered that problem. Forces specifics. Past behavior > hypothetical opinions.

  3. Why was that hard? Uncovers root cause. Their first answer is usually surface-level.

  4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this? Existing workarounds = real pain. No workarounds = not painful enough.

  5. What don't you love about the solutions you've tried? Reveals gaps in existing alternatives. This is your opportunity space.

Mom Test Rules

These rules override all default interviewing instincts:

  • NEVER ask "Would you use this?" or "What would you pay?" — hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
  • NEVER pitch your solution during the interview. The moment you pitch, you stop learning.
  • ALWAYS ask about past behavior. "Tell me about the last time..." not "Would you ever..."
  • Deflect compliments immediately. "That sounds great!" → "Thanks — but tell me more about how you currently handle this."
  • Anchor fluff to specifics. "I always struggle with..." → "When was the last time? Walk me through it."

Follow-up Framework (Gustaf Alstromer, YC)

After the Five Questions, probe for signal strength:

  • Frequency: "How often does this come up?" (Daily = strong signal)
  • Workarounds: "Show me how you do it today." (Screenshots, spreadsheets, hacks = gold)
  • Willingness to pay: "Have you looked for or paid for a solution?" (Spending = strongest signal)
  • Emotional weight: Watch for energy shifts — frustration, sighing, storytelling. That's where the real pain lives.

Read the full file on GitHub · 68 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 68 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A 7b5bbf151147

Subscribe to this mod's changes

user-interview is a skill published in the GitHub repository assimovt/productskills (68 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 822 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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