Turns raw interview notes into themed, evidence-tagged insights via a two-pass affinity-mapping procedure, with frequency and confidence ratings and stakeholder-ready quotes. Use when someone asks "synthesize these interviews", "what themes came out of our research round", "turn these transcripts into findings", or has finished a qualitative round and needs actionable output. Do NOT use for synthesizing published papers or mixed documents - use research-synthesis instead. Do NOT use for building the personas themselves - use user-persona instead. Do NOT use for consolidating hiring-interview scorecards - use interview-debrief-synthesizer instead.
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---
name: Interview Synthesis
description: Turns raw interview notes into themed, evidence-tagged insights via a two-pass affinity-mapping procedure, with frequency and confidence ratings and stakeholder-ready quotes. Use when someone asks "synthesize these interviews", "what themes came out of our research round", "turn these transcripts into findings", or has finished a qualitative round and needs actionable output. Do NOT use for synthesizing published papers or mixed documents - use research-synthesis instead. Do NOT use for building the personas themselves - use user-persona instead. Do NOT use for consolidating hiring-interview scorecards - use interview-debrief-synthesizer instead.
---
# Interview Synthesis
Synthesis is where data becomes insight. The job is not to summarize what people said - it is to identify the underlying pattern that explains why they said it and what it means for design or strategy. The costly failure it prevents is the highlight reel: a deck of cherry-picked quotes that confirms what the team already believed, laundered through the word "research."
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Gather inputs and check the dataset
Collect: the transcripts or structured notes, the original research questions, and who the findings are for (design team vs. executives changes the framing, not the rigor). Enforce the data rules:
- Every interview needs a cleaned transcript or structured notes with participant ID, date, and verbatim quotes marked. Do not synthesize from memory or from the researcher's paraphrase alone.
- **Minimum viable dataset: 5 interviews** for foundational themes. Fewer is workable only with an explicit low-confidence label on every finding.
- **Check for saturation**: if the last 3 interviews produced no new themes - only more evidence for existing ones - the round has reached saturation and the theme set can be treated as stable. If new themes were still appearing in the final interviews, say so and flag that more interviews would likely surface more; the synthesis is a snapshot, not the territory.
### Step 2: Extract atomic observations (pass one)
Go through each transcript and extract atomic observations - one idea per row or sticky note. These are factual, not interpretive: "P4 said she checks the app every morning before coffee," not "P4 is highly engaged." Keep the participant ID on every observation. Expect roughly 20-40 observations per hour-long interview; far fewer usually means the notes are summaries, not data.
### Step 3: Affinity-map the observations (pass two)