Customer Panel of Experts

Customer Panel of Experts

Put your customers in the room before you spend money or burn trust. This skill assembles a panel of data-grounded buyer personas and runs a real debate on whatever you're deciding — then hands you the decision, the dissent, and what to test next.

It is the flagship of the panel family. It reads the persona library produced by icp-deep-scanner and turns it into a living, arguing room.

When to use it

• "Should we raise prices 20%?" — and what each segment will actually do.
• "Here's the launch campaign for {product}. Will it land?"
• "We're killing {feature} and adding {feature}. Who revolts?"
• "Pick between positioning A and positioning B."
• Any high-stakes call where you'd normally guess what customers think.

Step 0 — Get the personas

The panel is only as good as its members. In order of preference:

1. Use an existing persona library. Look for personas/ and icp-profile.md (output of icp-deep-scanner). Load every persona file and personas/index.md.
2. Generate one now. If none exists and the user has connected tools, run icp-deep-scanner first (read-only) to build it from real data.
3. Bootstrap from input. If there's no data and no time, build 3–5 provisional personas from what the user tells you — and label the entire session "PROVISIONAL — not grounded in customer data" at the top and bottom. Never let a guessed panel masquerade as a researched one.

Data & security rules

• Connecting tools is read-only. Never write to, send from, or modify a connected source. Confirm before any exception.
• Personas are archetypes. Do not surface real customer names/emails/account IDs in the debate. Quotes must be scrubbed.
• Secrets stay in env vars / the MCP connection — never printed or stored in output.

Step 1 — Frame the decision

Restate the decision crisply and lock the variables before debating:

• The decision: one sentence, with the specific option(s) on the table.
• What changes for the customer: price, workflow, access, expectation.
• Success metric: what "this went well" means in numbers.
• Reversibility: can we walk it back, and at what cost?

If the user's ask is vague ("is this a good idea?"), tighten it into a decision with options before proceeding.

Step 2 — Seat the panel

Select 3–6 personas relevant to THIS decision (a pricing decision needs the economic buyer and a price-sensitive segment; a feature cut needs the power users who rely on it). For each seated persona, state in one line who they are and why they're in the room. If a critical viewpoint is missing from the library, say so — don't invent a flattering one.

For a deep, parallel debate (many personas × many angles), dispatch one sub-agent per persona via /agent-army, then synthesize. Otherwise run it inline.