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mom-test

Plan and evaluate customer conversations using The Mom Test — ask questions that even your mom can't lie to you about. Use when preparing for user interviews, evaluating research quality, or designing questions that extract real signal instead of polite lies.

80

Quality

76%

Does it follow best practices?

Impact

Pending

No eval scenarios have been run

SecuritybySnyk

Passed

No known issues

Optimize this skill with Tessl

npx tessl skill review --optimize ./product-skills/skills/mom-test/SKILL.md
SKILL.md
Quality
Evals
Security

Quality

Discovery

89%

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

This is a strong description that clearly identifies a specific methodology (The Mom Test), provides explicit 'Use when' triggers, and occupies a distinct niche. The main weakness is that the specific capabilities could be more granular — listing concrete actions like scoring transcripts, generating question lists, or flagging bad questions would strengthen it further.

Suggestions

Add more concrete specific actions such as 'generate interview question lists, score conversation transcripts for bias, flag leading or hypothetical questions' to improve specificity.

DimensionReasoningScore

Specificity

The description names the domain (customer conversations, user interviews) and some actions (plan, evaluate, design questions, extract real signal), but doesn't list multiple concrete specific actions like 'generate interview scripts, score conversation transcripts, flag leading questions.' The actions remain somewhat high-level.

2 / 3

Completeness

Clearly answers both what ('Plan and evaluate customer conversations using The Mom Test — ask questions that even your mom can't lie to you about') and when ('Use when preparing for user interviews, evaluating research quality, or designing questions that extract real signal instead of polite lies').

3 / 3

Trigger Term Quality

Includes strong natural trigger terms users would actually say: 'The Mom Test', 'user interviews', 'research quality', 'customer conversations', 'questions', 'polite lies', 'real signal'. These cover the natural vocabulary someone doing customer discovery would use.

3 / 3

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

The Mom Test is a very specific methodology with a distinct niche. The combination of 'The Mom Test', 'customer conversations', 'user interviews', and 'polite lies' creates a clear, unique identity that is unlikely to conflict with other skills.

3 / 3

Total

11

/

12

Passed

Implementation

62%

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

The skill provides excellent actionable guidance with clear workflows for three distinct use cases, making it highly practical for customer research. However, it is significantly over-verbose — explaining concepts Claude already knows (what hypotheticals are, why opinions are unreliable) and including extensive rationale that inflates token cost without adding value. The monolithic structure could benefit from splitting the three modes into referenced files.

Suggestions

Cut explanatory text that Claude already knows (e.g., why hypotheticals are unreliable, what leading questions are) — just list the patterns and rewrites without rationale paragraphs.

Remove the introductory paragraph explaining the problem ('Everyone says they'd use your product...') — Claude doesn't need motivation, just instructions.

Consider splitting the three modes (conversation planning, question audit, signal assessment) into separate referenced files to reduce the main skill's token footprint.

Trim the prompt template wrapper scaffolding (the $ARGUMENTS block, the 'if blank ask user' instruction) which adds boilerplate without improving Claude's execution.

DimensionReasoningScore

Conciseness

The skill is extremely verbose at ~150+ lines. It explains concepts Claude already understands (what hypotheticals are, what opinions are, what leading questions are), provides extensive rationale for each question type, and includes lengthy explanations that could be condensed significantly. The entire prompt template pattern adds unnecessary scaffolding.

1 / 3

Actionability

The skill provides highly concrete, actionable guidance: specific question examples, a table format for audits, exact criteria for evaluating signal vs. noise, specific bad-question rewrites, and clear categories for transcript analysis. Claude can directly execute any of the three modes with specific outputs.

3 / 3

Workflow Clarity

The skill clearly sequences three distinct workflows based on input type, each with well-defined steps and time allocations. The conversation plan has explicit phases (Opening → Their World → Specific Past Behavior → Commitment), the question audit has a clear table-based evaluation process, and the signal assessment has explicit categorization criteria with a structured summary output.

3 / 3

Progressive Disclosure

The Tips section references related skills (craft-discovery-synthesis, craft-spec, jobs-to-be-done) which is good navigation. However, the entire skill is monolithic — the three major modes (conversation planning, question audit, signal assessment) could be split into separate files. All content is inline in one large document with no external references for detailed content.

2 / 3

Total

9

/

12

Passed

Validation

90%

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation10 / 11 Passed

Validation for skill structure

CriteriaDescriptionResult

frontmatter_unknown_keys

Unknown frontmatter key(s) found; consider removing or moving to metadata

Warning

Total

10

/

11

Passed

Repository
amplitude/builder-skills
Reviewed

Table of Contents

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