Voice-of-Customer Miner
中文速览(Quick Guide)
- 做什么:从评论站、应用商店、Reddit 与从业者论坛等公开渠道挖掘客户原声,提炼未满足需求、竞品弱点与切换触发点。
- 何时用:想不等访谈周期就拿到客户声音时;对象无公开足迹、需要私有区域自有用户声音、或需要统计置信度时不适用。
- 核心步骤:①问最多 3 个问题(谁的声音、支撑什么决策、有无主题)并按假设推进;②过 search-plan 闸后做来源清扫;③逐条带 URL 抓原话;④按需求(而非功能)归主题并标注事实/推断/假设与来源偏差;⑤给 4 个下一步选项。
- 国内可达性:正文指定的公开源以境外站点为主,部分(如 Reddit、应用商店评论)在国内不可直接访问;此时可改用国内可访问的公开社区与评论渠道,并保持同样的「原话 + URL + 偏差标注」纪律。
Purpose
Mine public customer voice — review sites, app stores, Reddit and practitioner forums, community
boards — for unmet needs, competitor weaknesses, and switching triggers: search plan → source sweep
→ verbatim capture → need themes → so what → next-step options. This bridges competitive
intelligence and discovery: it delivers customers' exact words without waiting on an interview cycle.
But public voice skews toward the angry and the vocal, so every theme it surfaces is a hypothesis to
validate, never a verdict — the output's last stop is always a real conversation.
Input
Works best with: the product(s) or competitor(s) to mine — yours, a rival's, or a set — and the
decision this should inform.
Also useful: a theme to focus on (onboarding, pricing, reliability) if you have one; otherwise the
sweep runs open.
Input supplied inline with the invocation — text after the skill name, a pasted context dump, or an
appended ARGUMENTS: line — counts as answers already given. Use it against the question budget;
don't re-ask.
Arriving empty-handed? That works too. The skill opens with at most 3 questions (whose voice,
what decision, theme or open sweep) and proceeds on labeled assumptions if they go unanswered.
Example invocation: Mine voice-of-customer for [Competitor A] and [Competitor B], focus on
onboarding — informs whether our Q1 bet is a migration tool.
Key Concepts
- Governing protocol: honors the
autonomous-investigation
contract — question budget of 3, search-plan gate, Fact/Inference/Assumption labels, Just Enough
Mode, stable schema, 4-option Final Step. Discipline: OSINT's review-and-community layer (see
intelligence-collection-disciplines). - Theme by need, not by feature. "Exports are broken" is a feature complaint; "I can't get my
data where my team works" is the underlying need. Theming by need is the same solution-free
discipline as JTBD and painstorming — and it's what makes themes portable into discovery. - Verbatims are the product. Short, real, quoted customer language with URLs. Verbatims teach
persona language: the exact words customers use become interview probes and positioning copy.
Never fabricate quotes, ratings, review counts, or reviewer roles. - Every source has a known skew. Reviewers skew negative; vendor communities skew loyal; app
stores over-represent update anger. Note the bias per source — public voice is evidence with a
known skew, not ground truth. - Honest frequency. Recurring across sources ≠ concentrated in one thread ≠ isolated but
vivid. Say which; one articulate ranter is not a theme. - When NOT to use: no meaningful public footprint (early-stage, niche enterprise) → run
discovery-interview-prepinstead; you need your users'
voice on a private area → mine your own tickets and research; statistical confidence required →
this is qualitative theming.
Application
- Credit inline context, then ask only the unanswered questions (max 3):
- Whose customer voice — yours, a competitor's, or a set?
- What decision should this inform?
- Any specific theme to focus on, or open sweep?
- Show the 3-bullet search plan — which voice sources you'll sweep, how you'll select
representative verbatims, how observation will be separated from interpretation. Continue unless
revised. - Sweep mixed voice sources — review sites (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius), app stores, Reddit and
practitioner forums, community boards, social threads — capturing short real quotes with URLs and
noting each source's bias. - Emit the schema below exactly.
Output schema (do not reorder)
# Voice-of-Customer Snapshot
## 1. Scope
**Products mined:** | **Decision supported:** | **Sources swept:** | **As-of date:**
## 2. Need Themes
For each of the top 3-5 themes:
### Theme: [Underlying need, solution-free, 4 to 8 words]
- **Frequency:** [recurring across sources / concentrated / isolated]
- **Verbatim:** "[short real quote]" — [source, URL]
- **Verbatim:** "[short real quote]" — [source, URL]
- **Who says it:** [role/segment, if evident — labeled]
- **Reading:** [Inference — what this suggests]
## 3. Competitor Weak Points
- **[Competitor]:** [weakness in customers' words; frequency; URL]
- [Max 5, strongest evidence only]
## 4. Switching Triggers
- [What pushes customers off a product; what pulls them; labeled, cited]
## 5. So What?
- **3** opportunity hypotheses (phrased as problems, not features)
- **2** battle-card-ready weaknesses (with evidence quality noted)
- **3** assumptions to validate in real interviews
Each bullet: label, confidence, URL where relevant.
A copy/paste fill-in version of this schema, with quality checks, lives in template.md.
Final Step (offer exactly 4 options)
- Generate discovery interview questions from the top theme (
discovery-interview-prep) - Feed the weaknesses into a competitive battle card (
battle-card-builder) - Organize the top unmet needs into an opportunity → solution tree, then hand that tree to
downstream opportunity/solution decomposition - Re-run scoped to one theme in Verbose Mode
Accept 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 and 2, Verbose Mode, or a custom path.
Examples
A theme done right (fictional product, illustrative verbatims):
> ### Theme: getting historical data out at contract end
> - Frequency: recurring — 9 reviews across two sites plus a forum thread, past 6 months
> - Verbatim: "export took three support tickets and still dropped custom fields" — [G2-style review, URL]
> - Verbatim: "we stayed a year longer than we wanted because leaving meant losing our audit trail" — [forum thread, URL]
> - Who says it: ops managers at 50-200-person firms — Inference (reviewer titles where shown)
> - Reading: exit friction is functioning as involuntary retention — Inference; a rival with
> effortless migration turns this from their moat into their churn event.
Notice the theme name contains no feature ("export tool") — it names the need, so discovery can
explore solutions the reviews never imagined.
See examples/sample.md for a complete worked mining run (fictional
FSM-software market) where frequency honesty caps a vivid theme at low confidence and each
source's bias becomes a reading instruction. examples/sample-industrial.md
shows the thin-voice case — what honest mining looks like when the market barely posts reviews.
Common Pitfalls
- Feature-name theming. Clustering by the feature customers blame instead of the need underneath
hands your roadmap to the loudest UI complaint. - Verbatim laundering. Paraphrasing a review and quoting it. If it has quote marks, it must be a
real excerpt at a real URL — this domain's do-not-invent list exists because fabricated customer
quotes are both tempting and toxic. - Rant amplification. One vivid one-star review presented as a theme. Frequency honesty is the
discipline: recurring, concentrated, or isolated — say which. - Skew blindness. Reading review sites as a census. The angry and the vocal are over-sampled;
the satisfied-and-silent majority never posts. Bias notes per source are mandatory. - Skipping the validation handoff. Shipping themes straight into the roadmap. The output's
"assumptions to validate in real interviews" section is the bridge to discovery — use it.
When Sources Are Out of Reach (Failure Exits)
- Review sites unreachable or paywalled (G2, Capterra, app stores): Say which sources failed and switch to what is reachable — user-provided review exports, support tickets, community archives, or locally accessible sources the user nominates (for Chinese markets: practitioner forums, Zhihu-style Q&A, app store CN listings). Same sweep discipline applies; note each substitute source's skew like any other.
- Not a single verbatim URL captured: Stop and say so. Do not emit a theme with zero verbatims — paraphrased "quotes" are verbatim laundering (see Pitfalls). The honest deliverable is "no public voice found; here is what to do instead" → run
discovery-interview-prep. - Thin-voice market: Follow the
examples/sample-industrial.mdpattern — fewer themes, lower confidence caps, explicit absence-of-evidence notes; never pad frequency claims to look busy. - Garbage or contradictory input (gibberish product names, conflicting decisions): Ask one clarifying question naming the specific contradiction; if it stays unclear, proceed only on labeled Assumptions and mark the whole run's confidence accordingly — do not silently guess.
FAQ (Wrong → Right)
| Wrong | Right |
|---|---|
| Clustering by feature ("export complaints") | Theme by underlying need ("getting data out at contract end") — the name should survive solution changes |
| Paraphrasing a review into a "quote" | Only real excerpts at real URLs get quote marks; everything else is a labeled summary |
| Treating one vivid rant as a theme | Label frequency honestly: recurring across sources / concentrated / isolated |
| Feeding themes straight into the roadmap | Themes are hypotheses; the "assumptions to validate in real interviews" section is the required bridge |
| Trusting the source mix as representative | Every source has a skew (reviewers negative, vendor communities loyal) — bias note per source is mandatory |
References
autonomous-investigation(Workflow) — the governing protocolintelligence-collection-disciplines(Component) — OSINT review-mining sources and bias tradecraftjobs-to-be-done(Component) — the solution-free framing themes should land indiscovery-interview-prep(Interactive) — where the validation happens- Opportunity solution tree (external optional reference, not installed here) — structures the opportunity hypotheses
battle-card-builder(Workflow) — consumes the weak points- Adapted from
market-intelligence/voice-of-customer-miner-prompt.mdin the
https://github.com/deanpeters/product-manager-promptsrepo.