Playbook for planning and synthesizing user research — research questions, JTBD framing, interview-guide design, problem validation, and the leading-question traps to avoid. Used by user-researcher in the Discover stage.
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What the file says
# User Research — playbook
Good research kills bad ideas cheaply. The goal is not to confirm the assumed
problem — it is to find out whether the problem is real.
## Where this sits among great-pm skills
This is the **playbook layer** — how to plan, run, and synthesize research in a
great-pm cycle. It is deliberately thin on two things that have their own deep
skills:
- **For interview discipline** (how to ask without leading, the three rules, the
ethical boundary) → use **`mom-test`**. This skill tells you *what* to find out;
`mom-test` tells you *how to ask* so you get truth instead of politeness.
- **For synthesis structure** (the job/struggle/forces framing, scoring) → use
**`jobs-to-be-done`**. Section 2 below is the lightweight JTBD entry point;
`jobs-to-be-done` is the full operational model.
Downstream: validated opportunities feed **`opportunity-solution-tree`** (the
discovery structure) and **`circles-method`** (the Identify step). If you need to
size who is affected, hand off to `competitive-analysis` / `market-analyst`.
## 1. Frame the research question
Start from the assumed problem and turn it into questions that can be answered
…
The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260721.86de099, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_i45i354ifpc2zno3
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=vandanaajaydubey111/great-pm/user-research
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/c0e69ace39ca60ca405a17e7f5c000f3e772c56df2b83eb66b99752b1b72f2bd
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