Over my career as a product designer, I’ve noticed that we tend to make a lot of high-stakes decisions based on assumptions. These decisions almost always play out in undesirable ways: creepy scope, crunchy timelines, inadequate staffing, hobbled designs, burnt-out teams, unhappy clients…shall I go on? With so many crappy consequences, why do we continue to accept these high-stakes assumptions on each new project that rolls in the door? You can argue that it may be rooted in systemic issues at your company. That may be, but I’d suggest there’s a more fundamental issue underlying even those systemic ones. It’s a key skill that’s so obvious, it tends to evade our grasp: asking good questions. It’s a democratic skill. Anyone can ask a question at any point to anyone. But we don’t. Sure, we ask some questions but if we asked all the necessary ones, I’d argue that we wouldn’t see so much turmoil in the product design process.
Whatever your role, I want to personally empower you to ask more questions. The factors that mute our ability to validate information may vary, but I’ve identified three common pitfalls that tend to be my own question kryptonite, and have provided an easy strategy to overcome each one.
Pitfall: “It’s Better to Assume”
As a professional, one of my biggest fears is looking unknowledgeable or unprepared in front of my clients or team. This is a justifiable fear but if ego prevents me from asking questions that can enhance collective understanding of the problem or solution, it’s doing the whole project a disservice. I’ve come to realize that if the answer is truly an obvious one, great, it should be a quick conversation and now everyone knows it for sure. More often than not, I find these “basic questions” open up big, important conversations because everyone else also assumed it was such a simple question that no one bothered to actually establish an answer to it.
Strategy: Prep The Conversation
Simply stating up front in any conversation, “I may ask questions that seem obvious to you, but I don’t want to move forward on any assumptions,” not only makes space in the conversation for all flavors of questions, it demonstrates that you are diligent and thorough. Whether you end up simply validating a data point or exposing a major gap, you’ll be glad you asked.
Pitfall: “The Safe Assumption”
Experience often compels me to treat different situations similarly. The “I’ve built one digital product, I’ve built a million!” mentality. But I know, from experience, that no two projects are the same. When I hear, “We need a mobile app dashboard for our product,” it’s easy to immediately switch over into autopilot. It removes a lot of heavy lifting when I can reach for the cookie cutter and it might even make me feel smarter if I can ask less questions to get started. Don’t get me wrong, experience is an invaluable tool to leverage in all the work that we do but experience should never replace due diligence. On the contrary, experience should make us more diligent.
Strategy: Lead with Experience
Allow previous experiences to guide your discovery. Lean into the challenges you’ve faced on “similar” past projects, and hone in on where you’ve found success. Your experience in these areas should generate a robust collection of assumptions to validate, significantly enhancing your understanding of the current situation. “Remember last time when we assumed X to be true but we found it to be false after work began?” or “Remember on the last project like this one where we found X was really helpful and wished we’d known it sooner?” Let hindsight be 20/20 and leverage those golden nuggets on your new endeavors.
Pitfall: “The Assumed Assumption”
A tempting way to ask a question without losing authority is to imply the answer. The “I’m only asking to make sure you know too” ploy. The problem with this approach is that, many times, my collaborators and stakeholders are deep into the bump and grind of their own workflows, and, if it sounds like I already have the answer, it may be easier to assume my assumption than to drum up a whole new answer on their own. Similarly, if they don’t know the answer (but it sounds like I do), ego might persuade them to go along with my answer rather than expose that they don’t know.
Strategy: Ask Open-Ended Questions
When you ask an open-ended question, you encourage people to think through a problem without hints or clues guiding their thinking. Even if you think you know the answer and just want to validate it, resist the urge to offer it up. Give your collaborator the opportunity to pause and think through how they might answer the question. Whether their answer is what you expected or not, getting their raw response is more beneficial to you than a coached one and gives you much better insight into their perspective.
In sum, questions are a powerful tool. Whether you’re asking them or answering them, they help us understand each other better and shine a light into the corners of any situation. We can’t do our work without them and, in my experience, the more we ask, the better the outcome. I hope these strategies empower you to seek better shared understanding with your clients and colleagues and help you unleash your inner assumption assassin.
A Case for Questions was originally published in accpl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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