business-investigationlisted

# Business Investigation Systematic root cause analysis for business problems. Engineering debugging adapted for CEO tasks. **Triggers:** "why no signups", "why churn", "figure out why X", "what's wrong with Y", "investigate", "dig into" --- ## Iron Law **DO NOT PROPOSE SOLUTIONS WITHOUT INVESTIGATING THE ROOT CAUSE.** - Not "let's redesign the landing page" -> first "WHY signups = 0?" - Not "let's hire sales" -> first "WHY is the current approach not working?" - Symptomatic treatment creates whack-a-mole debugging. Find the root cause. --- ## Phase 1: Symptom Collection 1. **Define the problem specifically:** not "growth is slow", but "0 signups in 7 days with X visitors" or "3 out of 5 customers didn't complete onboarding" 2. **Gather data:** - Analytics tool: query quantitative data (see posthog-analytics skill or your analytics setup) - MEMORY.md: what do we already know about this problem? - Daily logs: were there similar problems before? What was tried? - Hypotheses.json: are there related hypotheses? 3. **Timeline:** when did the problem start? What changed? Regression = cause is in the change. --- ## Phase 2: Pattern Matching Check typical startup patterns: ### Funnel Problems | Where the problem is | Common cause | Where to look | |---|---|---| | Traffic -> signup | Positioning / channel / trust | Language, source quality, proof, CTA | | Signup -> activation | Product / onboarding / TTFV | Steps to first value, friction points | | Activation