“Morning Chaos” – First HabitFlow Discovery Chat ☕⏰

Background 📝

You’re the newly-appointed Product Manager for HabitFlow, a habit-tracking app in closed alpha. Your very first target user is Alex Carter — a 30-year-old marketing manager from Seattle who hopes to exercise and meditate before work but rarely manages it. Alex accepted an invite link from a friend last week and agreed to chat today.

The Situation 💬

The conversation will happen entirely in a text (Linkedin DM). At 7:30 a.m. Alex pings, typing between sips of coffee. They’re curious yet sceptical about “one more habit app.” Your task is to reconstruct Alex’s real morning timeline in their own words:

• ⏰ alarm
• ☕ coffee
• 📧 email scroll
• 🤸 maybe stretch
• 🏃 rush to meetings

Probe for yesterday’s sequence message-by-message and spot the exact moments where motivation, ability, or prompts collapse.

Your Goal 🎯

Elicit concrete past behaviour

Ask: “Walk me through yesterday from the alarm until you sat at your desk.”

Listen actively in text

Paraphrase: “So right after coffee you open Slack?” to confirm understanding.

Surface pain points without pitching

Note delays, context switches, and emotions (stress, guilt) for later feature ideas.

Success ✅ = a clear, time-stamped text narrative of Alex’s morning plus a shortlist of friction points you could test later.

Hint 💡

Use The Mom Test principles: avoid “Would you…” or “Do you like…” questions. Type open prompts and give Alex space to reply before sending follow-ups. Keep Fogg’s equation B = M × A × P in mind—identify which element is weakest. Resist solving; discovery first, solutions after.

Humans notoriously over-predict future behaviour—so asking “Will you use X?” produces polite but useless positives. Fitzpatrick recommends anchoring questions in the user’s current reality instead: “How do you track workouts today?” If that process is painful, the need for auto-import surfaces naturally. When you must explore a feature, present it like anthropology, not a pitch: “Some people compare streaks with friends—how would that land for you?” Accept dismissal gracefully; a negative signal saves months of dev time. Then dig into the why: if Alex fears public shame, that’s a segmentation clue (maybe HabitFlow needs private leaderboards). Keep an open stance—your metric is learning, not agreement.