Consulting, assessment week · September 2026 · 3 min
Draft the synthesis, with the quotes attached
An assessment ends with someone turning a pile of transcripts into findings and a roadmap. It is the valuable part, and it gets done at night by one person because there is never time for it.
/ How it runs
- Transcripts from Otter, Fireflies or Whisper
- Interview notes and questionnaires
- The firm's codebook
- Pass one: verbatim quotes with speaker and time
- Pass two: themes that cite quote IDs only
- Count participants per theme
- Reviewer accepts, edits or rejects
- Findings with a confidence line
- Every claim traceable to who said it
- A draft roadmap
What people say about it
A thread on r/ProductManagement puts it well: the community solved how to run an interview and ignored what to do with what you heard. Synthesis takes two or three days nobody planned for, so people skip it and go with their gut.
Researchers put numbers on it. Done properly, synthesis takes 75 to 125 percent of the interview time. One person with 22 interviews and a Friday deadline spent a full day just re-reading. The ones who manage it write a fifteen-minute summary after each call and code that instead of the transcript.
Why the obvious AI version gets thrown out
The complaints are the same everywhere. Themes that sound right and are not in the data. Quotes that drift when paraphrased. Output that reads like a model wrote it, so the senior person rewrites it anyway.
The people who kept using it added one rule: the model has to say where it heard something and from whom, and the evidence stays separate from the interpretation. One researcher runs a first pass that only extracts quotes with a speaker and a timestamp, and a second pass that can build themes but only from those quote IDs. He said that fixed the made-up themes. That is the design we would copy.
What we would build
Two passes, as above. Every theme carries the quotes it rests on and a count of how many people raised it, so one person's remark and eight people's complaint do not look the same. The consultant reviews each finding and the accepted ones become the draft roadmap. The interviews stay with people. The one-page summary for the sponsor stays with people too, because that part is political.
To check it works: run it on past engagements where the roadmap already exists and measure the gap. Then the test one researcher suggested, which is the honest one. Three months later, can anyone name a decision it changed?
/ More notes
Do the estate audit before the migration plan
The tooling is not the hard part of a Data Center to Cloud move. The hard part is that nobody knows what is in the instance, and the assessment that would tell them is done by hand by the most senior people.
- Jira and Confluence exports, read only
- Marketplace app list
- Script registry
- Usage: last update, issue counts
- Rate each item: duplicate, unused, migratable, blocker
- Keep the rule that fired and a confidence score
- Low confidence goes to a reviewer
- Consultant accepts, edits or rejects
- Traffic-light inventory of the whole estate
- Phased backlog in Jira Cloud
- Assessment report in Confluence
Get the real process out of the discovery calls
The documented process is the ideal. The real one lives in Excel, Outlook and one person's head. A week of discovery calls holds all of it, if someone has time to pull it out before the report is due.
- Call recordings and transcripts
- Discovery notes
- The agency's scoring rubric
- Extract steps, handoffs, systems and exceptions
- Draw the swimlane: a lane per role, a box per task, a diamond per decision
- Mark what was said against what an operator confirmed
- Score each finding with the rubric line and the segment
- Swimlanes an executive reads in one look
- Exception and workaround list
- Scored findings report, cited to the calls
Have a workflow like this one?
Thirty minutes. We map where it is stuck and what a first build looks like.
Book a free AI audit