Questions Before Answers
Usually on my desk, prominently displayed beneath my computer monitors, there is a bright purple index card with the words “Questions before Answers” written in my best fancy script. I have currently misplaced it and need to make a new one. I feel it’s absence.
After one particularly intense meeting with a stakeholder I walked away from my computer for a bit, breathed deeply, and created this card. Anyone who has worked with me is probably now thinking “I know exactly who she is talking about” but that’s the funny thing: you don’t. In every team I have worked with it’s a different difficult stakeholder, even varying day to day, often more than one. At this company it’s account managers, at that one it was operations, at this one here sales, over there engineering. I made the card because it’s a reminder of human nature more than a particular stakeholder. And in that conversation that day, it was me that needed the reminder.
Often in business we are trying to move fast. We come into a conversation, and someone is presenting something hurting them. Often, it’s something in the software that is not helping them. A missing filter, an interaction that isn’t quite right, a missing field, a process that is incomplete. Behind that is a whole set of business processes that have been built up by people doing their best with incomplete information or operations. People dealing with reality that we are trying to fit into software. Behind that is money, customers, demands. The real pain present, and all the things those people have done to solve their problem before talking to you, short circuits the conversation. We immediately get into solutions. “Just make this change”. Urgency drives and understanding falls by the wayside.
There are three things my kids know before anything else. The first is that I love them and they are safe. The second is that anything they want to do requires practice and there are no short cuts. The third is that we can solve any problem if we all agree first on the problem statement. Weirdly, all three of those also make it into my workplace. I’m at least very consistent. I am very diligent on how to bring those conversations back from “implement this change” to “how can we solve this problem together?”. How do I do that? The same way I do with my children.
The first thing I do is work to get down to the root problem. This includes questions like
- Can you walk me through that in the application?
- Please show me what you are doing when that happens.
- Help me understand what you are doing, what are you trying to do here?
- Explain it to me like I’m a German Shepherd.
That last one came from one of my favorite engineering teams, it’s great for breaking the tension.
Then I stop and I listen. I listen for a long time. I ask follow-up questions. I don’t try to solve their problem; I just keep coming back to make sure we on the same problem statement. The most powerful statements to help with this are:
- What I hear you saying is:
- I am seeing you do X, am I getting that right?
- It seems like the current parameters are X, is that right? Where within that are you hitting a problem?
It is so easy to slip into “if we just change this one thing, it will solve their problem”. That is quick wins thinking. And when you can find a quick win like that, celebrate. Write about it. Post to LinkedIn. Take a pause and tell all your friends. Because those so rarely happen. If the problems we faced had easy solutions where would the fun in that be?
Only once I can clearly articulate their problem, by asking a lot of questions, do I start to offer any solutions. And this is the beauty of that bright purple index card. It’s a reminder to me to stay humble and curious. Fundamentally, that is what product is. It’s solving business problems with technology, but we can only do that if we truly understand those problems.
Note: I don’t use AI to help write my posts or create example pictures. I do use AI to create the header image. In this case I prompted both Gemini and ChatGPT by giving it my blog post. In this case ChatGPT won.
Jennie Ocken 