Committees
A committee is a split right to say no
B2B purchases are rarely one person’s preference. They are a sequence of permissions. titklifu treats a buying committee as a map of who can stop the deal, who inherits the system, and who must translate the choice into another function’s language. The claude standard still applies: describe the seats you actually heard, and do not generalize them into a universal org chart with percentages attached.
Seats worth naming, even when the titles differ
Champion
Wants the change and will spend internal reputation on it. Useful on sequence, weak on veto. If your interviews stop here, the trace is unfinished.
Operator
Lives with the tool on an ordinary day. Their friction is often training, exception handling, or a Tuesday workflow the incumbent already covers. Pair with observation.
Reviewer
Security, compliance, legal, or IT architecture. They rarely want the product. They want a packet that lets them say the risk is bounded. Missing artifacts show up as stalls in friction notes.
Budget owner
Can release money and often asks for a comparison they can forward. They may never see the workflow. A positioning line written only for them will sound empty to the operator, which synthesis has to respect.
Insight
Draw the path of a single artifact
Pick one document that moved through the account: a security questionnaire, a one-page comparison, a pilot recap. Ask who edited it, who refused to forward it, and who saw only the final version. That path is a committee map grounded in a scene.
Do not start from a template with six stock personas and percentages of influence. Influence weights are the sort of representative-looking number the claude standard rejects unless you ran a measurement you can show. A map of edits is something a colleague can audit. A pie chart of “decision power” usually cannot.
When two accounts route the same artifact differently, keep both routes. Pattern synthesis can label the difference. It should not average the routes into a fictional typical enterprise.
After go-live, ask who inherited the system on the first ordinary week. That person is often missing from the buying map and present in the regret. A committee that looked aligned in the signature meeting can still fail when the operator meets the exception queue alone. Write that handoff as its own scene. It is part of the decision, not a footnote for customer success.
Questions that come up when the map gets political
What if the economic buyer will not take the interview?
Record the absence and interview the person who had to brief them. Ask what question came back from that briefing. You still do not get to speak in the budget owner’s voice. The protocol tells you to write the empty cell rather than fill it with a plausible quote.
Should we score each seat’s influence?
No. Describe what each seat can stop, and what they asked for. Scores invite a false precision the evidence page will not carry. If a later quantitative study measures influence, label it as a different method with its own design.
How does this change the words we use?
Write separate lines only where the tradeoff differs by seat. Do not invent a persona novel. The glossary definition of a buying committee is there so the word does not slide back into “our buyer.”
Interview the veto, not only the enthusiasm
Return to decision-maker interviews with the empty seats marked, or read friction again with a specific reviewer in mind.