The hand-wave problem.
Pre-PMF teams describe their ICP in words that survive any cross-examination: "engineering leaders at growing AI companies." That's not an ICP — that's a job title. A real ICP has a verb in it — what they're actively doing this quarter that makes your product matter now.
The 4-step build.
1. Interview, narrow. 5–10 calls with people who already pay (or actively try to). 45 minutes each. The script focuses on the last hard week, not abstract opinion. Record everything — Granola or Otter.
2. Tag with Dovetail (or Notion). Pull verbatim quotes into themes: pains, hacks, alternatives considered, kill criteria. Quotes beat summaries.
3. Synthesize with Claude. Feed all transcripts into a single Claude conversation with a JTBD-shaped prompt: "for each customer, write the job they hired this for, the situation that triggered it, and the alternative they fired." The model produces a JTBD map across customers.
4. Pressure-test with Perplexity. Take the resulting ICP and ask Perplexity to find 20 companies that look exactly like it. If you can't list them, the ICP is still too vague.
Output: a 1-pager that survives Monday.
One page: ICP definition, top 3 JTBDs, 5 verbatim pain quotes, top 5 objections with answers, anti-ICP (who not to sell to), 20 example accounts. Pin it. Refresh quarterly.
Get the interview script, the Claude synthesis prompt, and the 1-pager template — they ship in the weekly. See the signal library for what to do once the ICP is locked.