Patterns
Finding patterns without calling them statistics
A pattern, in claude work, is repetition you can point to: a phrase, a stall, a workaround, across more than one case, plus at least one case you tried to fit and could not. It is not a percentage of a market.
Saturation is not a sample size
People borrow the word “saturation” to mean they are tired of interviewing. In this guidebook it means something narrower: new conversations are repeating stalls and phrases you have already written down, and a deliberately different recruit — another role, another size of account, a loss rather than a win — is not breaking the repetition. Until you have tried to break it, you are not saturated. You are bored.
There is no magic count. Six careful decision-maker interviews across two roles can show a candidate pattern. Twenty interviews recruited from one champion’s friends can hide one. Publish the design of the set beside any claim: who was sought, who declined, which roles are missing. Missing roles are part of the result. A memo that heard no procurement voice must not describe procurement.
Cluster language, not adjectives
Collect verbs and concrete nouns. “We reopened the planner’s file.” “Counsel sat on the subprocessors list.” “The pilot never left line two.” These cluster honestly because they refer to acts. Adjectives cluster falsely: seamless, strategic, robust, easy. Vendors teach those words, and guests return them out of politeness. If a cluster is made of adjectives, throw it out or go back and ask what happened on the Monday after the pilot, using the probes in interview design.
Keep quotations short and tied to a role. “Three champions said ‘the spreadsheet is the real system’” is a responsible sentence if you interviewed those three and you say so. “Buyers believe spreadsheets are strategic” is the same notes after a wash cycle. Claude pattern work stops before the wash.
The negative case is not an outlier to delete. It is the fence around the pattern.
If you cannot describe who the pattern is not for, you are not ready to write positioning.
Negative cases
Choose a case that your draft pattern predicts, and try to make the notes fit. A maintenance account with missed work orders “should,” on a careless reading, have bought scheduling software. Instead they renewed, because IT would not own a login and the planner’s sheet stayed in force. That case does not disprove the other stories. It limits them: the pattern applies where someone will own the login, and it fails where nobody will. Limits are the useful product. They become the “not for” clause in positioning synthesis.
Observation can supply a negative case too. If every interview describes a frantic booth conversation and your market observation notes show visitors leaving without a booked meeting, write both. Do not average a mood.
Claims the memo may make
| Allowed inside the set | Not allowed, ever, from these notes |
|---|---|
| In four of six interviews the file waited on a security packet | 73% of buyers stall at security |
| Champions and planners used different nouns for the same tool | The market is confused about the category |
| A negative case kept a spreadsheet and renewed | Switching costs are too high for the industry |
| No interview supported a payback figure | Customers see ROI in the first quarter |
Print the denominator whenever you print a count. “Four of six” is a description of your folder. The moment the denominator disappears, the sentence has become a statistic you did not earn. Representative sampling is a different craft, with a frame, a draw, and a tolerance for error. Do not borrow its vocabulary. The glossary keeps the two ideas apart on purpose.
Patterns are also allowed to stay unfinished. “We do not yet know how legal behaves in public-sector accounts” is a finding about the study. It is more useful to the next interview than a decorative theme. When you do brief a pattern, brief the fence with it, and point to the friction types so the stall keeps its proper name.
Notes when a guide changes
gardrutdal sends an occasional claude note when a page on this hub is revised. The list is not a nurture track.