Every one of you has a chore. Something small and repeated and mildly irritating that you do by hand: a tally you keep, a list you retype, a count you always get wrong once, a thing you check three times because you do not trust yourself.
Today you are somebodyâs client, and somebody is yours. Nobody builds anything. The only product is a single sentence, written by the interviewer, that the person being interviewed agrees is true.
The task
Twelve minutes each way, in three rounds. Interviewer takes notes; client talks. Then swap, completely, before either of you says anything clever about solutions.
Round one â what happens now (five minutes). âWalk me through it, from the beginning, as if I have never seen it.â Ask for the actual steps, in order, including the boring ones. Where do the numbers come from? What do you write them on? What do you do with it afterwards?
Round two â where it goes wrong (four minutes). âWhat makes it go wrong?â Then wait. The first answer is rarely the real one, and the silence after it is doing work â do not fill it. Follow up with: âwhen was the last time that happened?â A specific story beats a general complaint every time.
Round three â what would be enough (three minutes). âIf this got better but not perfect, what would âbetterâ look like?â And: âwhat would you do with the time?â If the answer is ânothing muchâ, you may have found a chore that is not worth automating, and finding that out in twelve minutes rather than three weeks is a win.
The sentence
Now write one sentence, in your clientâs words, not yours:
[Name] spends [how long] doing [what], and it goes wrong when [when], which matters because [why].
Read it back to them out loud. Watch their face. They will correct you â everybody gets corrected â and the correction is the entire lesson of this exploration. Write down what you had wrong.
The manners, which are not optional
- Ask before you write anything down, and say what the notes are for.
- Never record another personâs name, contact details, marks, health, or money in your notes. If the chore involves other people, refer to them as âa studentâ, âa parentâ, âa coachâ.
- If your client says something is private, it is private. Do not repeat it in the debrief, and do not put it in a design document.
- Your client can stop, change their mind, or ask you to delete the notes at any time, including later.
These are the same rules that govern the real interview behind The Community App. Practising them on a friend, about a chore that does not matter, is how they become automatic when the stakes are a real personâs real work.
Facilitation notes
Visibly random pairs, and enforce the swap. Left to themselves, pairs spend the whole period on the more interesting chore. Call the swap on a timer, mid-thought if necessary.
Timing in a 70-minute period. Five to set up and read the manners; twelve for interview one; two to write sentence one; twelve for interview two; two for sentence two; ten for the read-backs and corrections; the rest for the debrief below and a look ahead to Interviewing Your Client.
The intervention that matters. Circulate listening for the word âappâ. The moment an interviewer proposes a solution, the client stops describing their problem and starts evaluating the proposal â and the real problem never surfaces. A quiet âask them what happens nowâ is usually enough to reset it.
Debrief on the corrections, not the chores. Poll the room: whose sentence was corrected? On what â the what, the when, or the why? Almost everybody gets the âwhyâ wrong, which is the finding worth writing on the board.
If a pair claims to have no chore, ask what they have to be reminded to do, or what they check twice. Everybody checks something twice.
Extension. Have the interviewer write down one thing their client said twice, unprompted. Repetition is the strongest signal in any requirements conversation, and students spot it once told to look.
What tends to surface
That listening is harder and more active than it looks. That the first description of a problem is a summary, and summaries hide exactly the detail that matters. That âit takes agesâ turns out to mean four minutes, and âit is fine, honestlyâ turns out to mean twenty. That the question you did not think to ask is the one that changes what you would have built.
And usually one uncomfortable discovery: the thing your client actually wants is not the thing you were already imagining building for them. Better to learn it now, from a friend, in a room where nothing is at stake.
Where this goes next
The real version â a real person, consent, notes, and a problem statement they sign off on â is Interviewing Your Client, and it is the first milestone of The Community App. The five-minute drill that keeps the habit sharp is What Would You Ask. The reason all of this counts as computer science, rather than as manners, is The Software Development Process: a specification you did not clarify is a program you will build twice.
The answer is not on this page
There is no list of correct questions here, and there could not be. The right question depends on the person in front of you and on the answer they just gave, which is why we practise it on each other before anyoneâs real client is in the room.
Curriculum connection
B4.2
use a variety of techniques (e.g., dialogue, questionnaires, surveys, research) to clarify program specifications;
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B1.2
demonstrate the ability to solve problems independently and as part of a team;
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