Development
Interview Me
Extracts what the user actually wants instead of what they think they should want. Achieves this through one-question-at-a-time interview until ~95% confidence.
Extracts what the user actually wants instead of what they think they should want. Achieves this through one-question-at-a-time interview until ~95% confidence.
What people ask for and what they actually want are different things. This skill closes the gap before it costs anything.
Before asking anything, write down your current best read plus an honest confidence number (0–100%):
HYPOTHESIS: You want a way to answer "how are we doing?" in standup, and "dashboard" was the convention that came to mind.
CONFIDENCE: ~30% — missing: who it's for, what "metrics" means, and what success looks like
Q: <one focused question>
GUESS: <your hypothesis for the answer, with reasoning>
Why one at a time, not a batch:
Why attach a guess:
Watch for:
When you hear these, ask:
"If you didn't have to justify this to anyone, what would you actually want?"
When confidence is high, write back what you think the user wants:
Here's what I now think you want:
- Outcome: <one line>
- User: <one line — who benefits>
- Why now: <one line — what changed>
- Success: <one line — how we know it worked>
- Constraint: <one line — the binding limit>
- Out of scope: <one line — what we're explicitly not doing>
Yes / no / refine?
The gate is an explicit "yes." These are not yes:
You're done when you can answer yes to this:
Can I predict the user's reaction to the next three questions I would ask?
If yes, you have shared understanding. Stop interviewing and produce the restate.
User: build me a dashboard for our metrics
Agent:
HYPOTHESIS: You want a way to answer "how are we doing?" in standup.
CONFIDENCE: ~30% — missing: who it's for, what "metrics" are, success criteria
Q: When you say "how are we doing?", who's asking — you alone, the team, or up the chain?
GUESS: engineering team in standup, because "we" usually scopes that way
User: It's actually for me. I keep losing track of which experiments are running.
Agent:
Updated read: not a team dashboard. It's a personal experiment tracker. Confidence: ~60%
Q: Is the gap that you don't know which experiments exist, or that you can't see their results in one place?
GUESS: the second one. Results live in five different tools.
User: First one actually. I literally don't have a list.
Agent: Two questions in, the actual ask isn't "a dashboard." It's "a list."
After applying interview-me: