Ask what they do on Monday mornings
The one discovery question that keeps getting me better answers than "what software do you need?"
1 min read
- discovery
- clients
When I start working with a business, I used to ask what they wanted built. People answered politely and vaguely. "Something to track orders." "A dashboard." "Maybe some AI?"
Now I ask what they do on Monday mornings.
That question gets specific answers fast. The owner of a small printing shop told me she spends the first two hours of every week copying WhatsApp orders into a spreadsheet, then calling three customers whose files were the wrong size. Nobody had asked her about that, because it didn't sound like a software problem. It was the whole problem.
A few follow-ups that usually come after:
- What do you copy from one place to another?
- What do you check that's almost always fine?
- Who do you call when something is late, and how do you find out it's late?
- What would you stop doing if someone else did it?
I write the answers down word for word. The words people use for their own work end up as labels in the software, and that alone makes the first version easier to adopt.