A person with a problem goes on the board in three sentences. You do not get to build anything. You get to write one question you would ask them first. That is the whole routine, and it is the most useful five minutes in this course, because the fastest way to waste three weeks is to build the thing you assumed somebody wanted.
Today’s person
The head coach of a school team keeps attendance for practices on a paper sheet on a clipboard. At the end of the season she needs to know who is eligible for an award, and she says it takes her “a whole evening, and I always get it wrong once.”
Everyone writes one question. Then we read them aloud and sort them.
Sorting the questions
| Question | What it is really doing |
|---|---|
| ”Could I build you an app?” | Proposing a solution before hearing the problem |
| ”How many practices are there in a season?” | Useful, small, factual — a detail for later |
| ”What makes the counting go wrong?” | Aimed at the actual pain, and likely to surprise you |
| ”What would you do with the extra evening?” | Checking the problem is worth solving at all |
The third and fourth kinds are what we are training. A question that could change what you build is worth ten that merely fill in a form.
The habits underneath
- Ask about the problem before you mention any solution
- Ask what happens now, step by step, including the annoying parts
- Ask what “good enough” would look like — you are not building everything
- Ask what they would want kept private, and who else sees this information
- Listen for the sentence they say twice; it is usually the real problem
One variation
Two rounds. In the first, everyone writes a question; in the second, somebody plays the person and answers the top three questions in character. The answers are almost never what the room expected — which is exactly the lesson.
This routine feeds The Client Interview and, eventually, the real conversation behind The Community App. The manners and the consent that go with a real interview are in Interviewing Your Client.