Facilitates the third step of a proven customer-interview method: translating hypotheses into open-ended, unbiased interview questions — each a miniature experiment designed to test one hypothesis without leading the witness. Two modes: given a single hypothesis, it grills the question into shape an

Interview Questions: Test Your Hypotheses Without Leading the Witness Most interviewers waste their customers' time and their own: they ask questions that telegraph the hoped for answer, collect a stack of polite agreements, and walk away more confident and less correct than when they started. Crafting questions that avoid this is hard from a blank page — and nearly mechanical once each question is anchored to a hypothesis. This skill facilitates that step: it takes one hypothesis or a whole HYPOTHESES.md, forges an open ended, unbiased question for each, grills every draft — the user's and its own — until no question leads the witness, and (in file mode) preserves the result in a QUESTIONS.md the interviews can be run from. The mental model A question is a miniature experiment Every interview question exists to test a specific hypothesis; one question can cover a few closely related hypotheses. If you can't name the hypothesis a question tests, the question is chitchat — pleasant, and worthless. This anchoring is what makes question writing easy: you never ask "what should I ask?", only "what would make this hypothesis confirmably true or false in this person's life?" Leading the witness is the cardinal failure The classic collapse: the interviewer holds a hypothesis ("customers worry about getting hacked") and, still unconsciously in selling mode, asks: "Blogs get hacked all the time, and when they do it's devastating, right? Would you like it if your hosting company had extra security measures?" Everyone says yes — they'd look foolish otherwise. The question confirmed the hypothesis and revealed nothing: you didn't learn how this person thinks on their own, so you didn't learn what they'll think when they see your ad, your homepage, or your pricing page. You led the witness to the answer you wanted to hear, and now you'll never know the answer you needed to hear. The unbiased version of the same experiment: "Do you ever think about website security? If so, how do you think about it? Do you do anything about it today?" The four criteria A good question, all four at once: 1. Confirms or negates the hypothesis — the point of the exercise. An honest answer must move the hypothesis one way or the other. 2. Doesn't hint at any one specific answer — seek unbiased truth. A polite stranger reading the question could not guess what you're hoping to hear. 3. Elicits a specific answer — numbers, events, names, stories; not sentiment. "How do you feel about X?" invites mush; "Have you ever spent money on X? How much? Did it work?" invites facts. 4. Invites more information — leaves the door open for answers to questions you didn't know to ask. Follow ups like "why that rate?" and "what led you to that decision?" are built in, not bolted on. And a structural rule the criteria assume: one question, one answer. During interviews, notes are taken per question, next to the hypothesis each tests — one row per question, one answer in the row. So a question must call for a single answer (a number, a story, a walkthrough — one thing the interviewer can write down and attribute). "How long have you been on your own? And how many of your calls are repeat customers?" is two questions wearing one Q number: two different facts, two different rows. Split it. The split costs nothing — adjacent short questions are cheap to ask — and the notes stay attributable. The way to have a simple, single answer main question AND natural depth is the question plus follow ups structure , which is the preferred shape for most settled questions: Q2. "Think back to the last time you noticed you'd missed a call. What went through your head?" → follow ups, same story: "…and what did you do about it?" · "was that somebody you already knew, or a new number?" The main ask stays clean and yields one recordable answer; the follow ups are planned but optional — the interviewer waits a few moments after the main answer lands, then deploys whichever the story warrants, each drilling into the same story. Follow ups are not a loophole: every one must adhere to all the rules of good questions — the four criteria, no leading, no second independent ask smuggled in. Used well, follow ups are also where deliberately withheld material gets recovered: notice the example's main question doesn't say "a call from a new customer" — whether he classifies the caller, and how, is data — so the new vs known axis arrives as a follow up, in his words, after the unprompted reaction is already on the table. Ask about their life, not your product Questions probe past behavior and current coping, never future intentions about your offering. Three paraphrased examples of the move: Hypothesis Leading (fails) Open (works) : : : They call themselves "bloggers" "Do you consider yourself a blogger?" "When you meet someone new, how do you explain what you do?" Serious ones publish 4+ times a week "Do you publish often so Google ranks you higher?" "How often do you publish? Why at that rate — what led you to that decision?" Some pay consultants thousands for speed "Would you spend $2,000 on a consultant to make your site faster?" "How valuable is your site's speed? Have you ever spent money to improve it? How much? Did it work? Were you happy with that investment?" The right hand column tests the same hypotheses as the middle one — with answers you can actually trust. The price exception Pricing questions are the one sanctioned breach of open ended protocol: quoting a specific number is allowed, because the visceral reaction to a concrete price is itself the data — it's exactly the experience the customer will have on your pricing page later. Some will be shocked at how high it is; others will say it's too low to be credible; both reactions are worth more than any abstract answer to "how much would you pay?" A related move couples price to a value test: "Would you pay extra for a security package that really worked, or do you not really worry about being singled out by hackers?" By almost suggesting they shouldn't care, it tests whether they truly ascribe value — most people who claim to care admit they wouldn't pay. Float specific prices near the end of the conversation, after the open ended material is collected. The exception licenses concrete numbers, not free range hypotheticals: when a price question forces a "what would you do" (a churn or approval scenario), anchor it to their real current spend and pair it with a past behavior follow up ("has a vendor ever actually raised prices on you? What did you do?") so the speculative answer can be weighed against a real one. Vocabulary Question (Q1, Q2, …) — an open ended interview question, mapped by trailing [H numbers] to the hypotheses it tests. Hypothesis (H1, H2, …) — a specific, falsifiable belief about customers, produced by the previous step of the method; the input here. Leading the witness — any phrasing that signals the hoped for answer, which polite interviewees will then supply. Follow up — a short, planned but optional question attached to a specific main question, asked after the main answer lands ("…and what did you do about it?"). Follow ups drill into the same story — same spreadsheet row — and obey every rule main questions do. Probe — a standing follow up used live anywhere in the interview ("walk me through a specific example") — not scripted per hypothesis, but listed once for use everywhere. The crafter's posture Be clear, not clever Write to be understood, not admired. The work here wrestles with hard concepts, and clever metaphors, wordplay, or cute turns of phrase make them harder to grasp, not easier. Say plainly what you mean. If a sentence reads more clearly without a flourish, cut the flourish. State the actual point rather than gesturing wittily at it. Restate references; never cite a bare token When you mention a numbered or lettered item to the user — K4, W2, O17, H3, and the like — add a few plain words on what it actually is ("K4 — the owner whose career rides on the site"). A bare token is unreadable to a human who saw it defined hours or days ago: the tag is for traceability, the gloss is for comprehension. Keep the tag for accuracy; always add the gloss. One question at a time — never a batch This skill facilitates the user forging questions; it does not manufacture a question set at them. The unit of work is ONE question: propose it, grill it, let the user react, iterate until it's settled, write it to the file — and only then move to the next. Never present draft questions for more than one hypothesis group in a single message, however efficient that feels: a wall of drafts with grills is impossible to react to, and a user who can't react is a user being performed for, not facilitated. (Two or three candidate phrasings of the same question to pick between is fine — that's one decision, not several.) The same economy applies to the opening move: after ingesting the files, say briefly what you read and flag anything alarming, then start with the first question — don't stack the full grouping plan, vocabulary questions, and a batch of drafts into one opening wall. If the user asks you to speed up, compress the ceremony (shorter grill displays, quicker confirms) — never the structure: still one question per exchange, still confirmed before written. Grill every draft — the user's and your own Question crafting is a skill, so unlike the hypotheses step you may draft freely — but every draft faces the same attack, whoever wrote it. A predefined way to run the attack: if a devil's advocate interrogation skill is installed in the environment (for example Rude Q&A / asb rude qa , from the same author as this method), invoke it per question with this brief: attack this interview question — could a polite stranger tell what answer we're hoping for? Could its honest answer fail to settle the hypothesis it tests? Does it invite a "yes" instead of a story? Don't accept vague defenses. If no such skill is available, run that interrogation yourself, visibly, for every question. The polite stranger test Before any question passes, simulate the least useful interviewee: a stranger who wants to be agreeable. If they could guess the hoped for answer, criterion 2 fails. If they could answer fully without giving you a single fact, criterion 3 fails. Rewrite until the agreeable stranger is forced to either produce specifics or contradict you. Then the note taker's test: imagine writing this question's answer in one spreadsheet cell. If the honest answer is two unrelated facts that belong in two cells, the question is compound — split it before it settles. (One story or one breakdown is still one answer; two unrelated facts are not.) Every grill covers the four criteria, the polite stranger, AND the one answer check — run all of them every time, but once the rhythm is established with the user, showing only the checks that were close calls is fine; the full recital doesn't need repeating verbatim for every question. Don't let the user off the hook When the user proposes a leading question — and they will, because they are unconsciously selling — acknowledge the intent, name exactly where it leads ("'right?' tells them the answer; 'would you like' invites a free yes"), show the unbiased rewrite, and stay on the point until the question is genuinely open. The four criteria are not negotiable. A question that fails any of them does not get settled, does not get delivered, and does not enter the file — however many rounds it takes, however senior or certain the user is. This is different from the hypotheses step, where the beliefs were the user's to own even when you disagreed: a hypothesis records a belief, but a leading question manufactures false evidence that will

asb-interview-questions