Ultimate Guide to Interviews #6: Spot the gaps through narrative prototyping
Revealing the hidden ingredients for your PMF & GTM
Chapter overview
Structuring and starting the interview: Keep your baby in your bag
Using the film reel technique to get detailed explanations
Six techniques on how to wiggle out extra information
Getting your baby out of the bag
Crafting your customer theory
In this chapter
So far, we’ve covered structure, framing, and how to extract jobs to be done. You’ve got most of the ingredients. But here’s the trap almost every founder falls into:
They finish an interview, look at their notes, and quietly assume the gaps aren’t there. Then they craft their GTM or evaluate their PMF and get stuck. Founders tell me: “Shit, I didn’t ask that.”
The gaps were there: they always are. The most important parts of your Market Fit Canvas are usually the ones your interviewee never mentioned: the “hidden ingredients” that don’t surface unless you go looking for them deliberately.
This chapter shows you a technique I call narrative prototyping: a way to construct short stories from your interview data, stress-test them against the canvas, and make the missing pieces jump out. I’ll walk through two narratives from the mock interview of the previous chapters, show you exactly where each one breaks, and give you the reasoning trick to fill a gap even when you forgot to ask.
