Focus Group

Use this skill to put a product in a room with the people it may affect before calling it obvious, useful, or ready. The room is synthetic: participants are fictional composites used as disciplined evaluation lenses, not sampled humans or evidence of market prevalence.

Combine three established practices when the subject needs them:

• a focus group for moderated reaction and discussion;
• usability testing for realistic task attempts;
• a cognitive walkthrough for expectation, action, feedback, and recovery.

The active project configuration lives at project-root-relative .focus-group/config.json. Profile and procedure schemas ship with the skill in [`references/config-contract.md`](references/config-contract.md). Review and outcome details are loaded only for those modes:

• For review, read

[`references/review-contract.md`](references/review-contract.md).

• For outcome routing or materialization, read

[`references/outcome-contract.md`](references/outcome-contract.md).

Command modes

These are command-like skill modes. focus-group review selects a procedure; it does not claim that a focus-group executable exists unless a live command descriptor and implementation prove that surface.

Non-negotiable distinctions

• Put SYNTHETIC FOCUS GROUP — NOT HUMAN RESEARCH at the top of every human-

facing session artifact. Never describe the panel as respondents, customers, interviewees, or a sample of a population.

• Build people from goals, capabilities, context, access needs, constraints,

and behavior. A grandmother is a person with a biography and specific skills, not shorthand for “bad at technology.” Do not infer beliefs or limitations from age, disability, culture, gender, or another protected trait.

• Separate observed evidence from persona-inferred reaction and

moderator-inferred synthesis. A plausible fictional reaction is still an inference.

• Exercise the real artifact when it exists. A concept-only review may test

comprehension and desirability hypotheses; it cannot claim task success.

• Preserve disagreement. Participants may value incompatible things, miss a

problem, or reject the premise. Do not manufacture consensus to make the report tidy.

• A transcript contains the complete user-facing moderator and participant

dialogue, task actions, observations, and follow-ups within the procedure's moderation budget. It never contains or requests private chain-of-thought.

• Every finding ends with exactly one disposition. No recommendation is allowed

to float into a decorative “next steps” list.

Procedure

1. Frame the session

Name the subject, decision to inform, target users, available artifact, and questions the session can and cannot answer. Inspect the project authority and work conventions before choosing output paths. Load the active configuration; if it is absent, standards init creates the exact proposed configuration and empty project-owned profile/procedure directories defined by the config contract. It does not invent a universal persona baseline. Keep it proposed until the project-specific library is complete, validated, and accepted.

2. Select the panel

Choose four to seven profiles whose differences are causal for this subject. Cover the direct user, a newcomer, a relevant access or environmental constraint, a builder or operator when they bear product cost, and a skeptical or trust-sensitive participant when the product asks for adoption or data. Include an agent only when an agent actually uses, operates, integrates, or is affected by the subject.

Prefer an existing profile. Create one when the required perspective is missing, then validate it. Snapshot each selected profile id and revision into the run so later profile edits cannot rewrite history.

Treat panel.profilePool as eligible lenses, not a default panel. Record the causal reason for every selected seat in the research brief and snapshot only that selected panel in SESSION.json.

3. Choose or codify the procedure

Select the narrowest procedure that answers the research question. Use concept panels for propositions, task walkthroughs for interaction, access-and- constraints reviews for inclusive failure modes, and shipping reviews for a combined gate. Create a procedure when the decision requires a genuinely new sequence, evidence rule, or output—not merely different moderator wording. Honor its task and follow-up budget. If the evidence gap warrants an extension, record the extension under the procedure's explicit rule before continuing.

4. Moderate against evidence

Follow the configured phases. Record the moderator prompt, each participant's response, task action, visible product response, follow-up, cross-talk, and phase close. Stop when required records are saturated under the procedure's moderationBudget; a full transcript preserves the bounded session rather than rewarding repetition. Let profiles notice different evidence; do not give every participant every finding. Mark unexercised or unavailable surfaces plainly.

5. Synthesize findings

Create stable finding ids. Each finding records the evidence, affected participants, evidence class, severity, confidence, product owner, and smallest useful response. Distinguish a repeated panel theme from several profiles repeating the same assumption supplied by the moderator.

6. Produce and route outcomes

Give every finding exactly one disposition:

• work-item
• design-concept
• feature-request
• decision-record
• research-question
• no-action
• needs-routing

Resolve the destination from the user request, active focus-group config, project authority files, and canonical work system—in that order. Never invent TODO.md, a proposal folder, or a second backlog when the project already owns that artifact elsewhere. Use a stable fingerprint to detect an existing item.

Keep inferred hypotheses as drafts unless the outcome contract permits their materialization. Inferred work items, feature requests, and decision records need an explicit adoption record at materialization; unknown evidence stays a research question, routing problem, or justified no-action.

Materialize reversible, project-local artifacts when the selected review mode and project policy authorize them. Preview remote or external tasks and ask at the write boundary unless that write was already authorized. Record the final route state even when the result is no-action or needs-routing.

7. Verify the run

The configured session bundle contains:

1. 1SESSION.json — subject, question, artifact, config, profile revisions, procedure revision, evidence limits, and run timestamps;
2. 2PARTICIPANTS.md — readable snapshots of the selected profiles;
3. 3TRANSCRIPT.md — the complete labeled synthetic dialogue and task record;
4. 4FINDINGS.md — evidence-backed synthesis and disagreements;
5. 5OUTCOMES.json — machine-readable dispositions and routing receipts.

Run python3 /absolute/path/to/focus-group/scripts/validate.py config .focus-group before a session and python3 /absolute/path/to/focus-group/scripts/validate.py outcomes .focus-group/runs/YYYY-MM-DD-subject/OUTCOMES.json after synthesis. Then run python3 /absolute/path/to/focus-group/scripts/validate.py run .focus-group/runs/YYYY-MM-DD-subject before claiming session completion. Confirm that every materialized item exists in its canonical owner and that the ledger contains no duplicate fingerprint or orphan finding.

Output

Lead with the decision the session informs. Then report:

• panel and procedure used;
• strongest observed finding and strongest persona-based hypothesis;
• disagreements that change the product decision;
• outcome counts by disposition and route state;
• created artifacts or tasks with their canonical paths/ids;
• limits requiring real users or additional evidence.

Do not report a synthetic session as product validation. Its honest claim is that a consistent set of perspectives exercised the available evidence and produced traceable hypotheses and project-owned outcomes.