Research Questions Before Interviews starts with a simple test: does this make the work more decidable, or does it only make the work easier to describe? Research Questions Before Interviews: in discovery and customer research, teams often mistake fluency for progress. Research Questions Before Interviews: they can explain the issue, name the stakeholders, and produce a tidy artifact while the actual research decision remains untouched.

Research Questions Before Interviews matters because operating systems decay when decisions stay implied. Research Questions Before Interviews: the company keeps moving, but each team carries a different version of the truth. Research Questions Before Interviews: one group thinks the bet is strategic. Research Questions Before Interviews: another treats it as optional. Research Questions Before Interviews: a third waits for a signal that nobody has agreed to produce. Research Questions Before Interviews: the surface looks aligned until execution exposes the disagreement.

Research Questions Before Interviews is the part of the series that moves the argument from vague agreement into a sharper operating question. Research Questions Before Interviews: the post should therefore leave the reader with something more useful than a principle. Research Questions Before Interviews: it should leave a sharper question, a better artifact, and a way to inspect whether the work changed.

Where the work breaks

Research Questions Before Interviews breaks when the team keeps the conversation abstract. Research Questions Before Interviews: abstract language lets everyone nod because nobody has to give anything up. Research Questions Before Interviews: a real decision has a cost. Research Questions Before Interviews: it changes priority, sequence, ownership, scope, customer contact, or follow-through. Research Questions Before Interviews: if none of those things changes, the team may have had a good conversation, but it has not changed the operating system.

Research Questions Before Interviews also breaks when teams use process as a substitute for judgment. Research Questions Before Interviews: a meeting can collect updates without creating insight. Research Questions Before Interviews: a memo can summarize context without recommending a choice. Research Questions Before Interviews: a dashboard can show movement without showing whether the movement matters. Research Questions Before Interviews: the repair is not more ceremony. Research Questions Before Interviews: the repair is a clearer relationship between evidence and action.

Research Questions Before Interviews has another failure mode: people protect optionality until the decision window closes. Research Questions Before Interviews: optionality feels responsible because it avoids premature commitment. Research Questions Before Interviews: past a certain point, though, optionality becomes a tax. Research Questions Before Interviews: teams keep weak work alive, delay learning, spread attention thin, and make every downstream handoff harder.

What good looks like

Research Questions Before Interviews is healthy when a team can say what changed after the conversation. Research Questions Before Interviews: the change might be small: a narrower customer segment, a stopped feature, a clearer launch owner, a better research question, a different account plan, or a new review date. Research Questions Before Interviews: small changes count when they remove ambiguity and create forward motion.

Research Questions Before Interviews should make disagreement more useful. Research Questions Before Interviews: good disagreement is not noise. Research Questions Before Interviews: it is information about assumptions, risk, incentives, and evidence quality. Research Questions Before Interviews: the operating move is to capture the disagreement in a form the team can test. Research Questions Before Interviews: if the disagreement cannot be tested, it should at least be named as a judgment call instead of hidden as consensus.

Research Questions Before Interviews should also protect the team from false completeness. Research Questions Before Interviews: complete-looking artifacts can still avoid the most important question. Research Questions Before Interviews: the test is whether a new person could read the artifact and understand the decision, the evidence, the tradeoff, the owner, and the next inspection point without reconstructing the whole history.

The useful artifact

Research Questions Before Interviews needs an artifact that is small enough to survive normal work. Research Questions Before Interviews: a useful artifact has five parts: the decision, the evidence, the tradeoff, the owner, and the review trigger. Research Questions Before Interviews: anything beyond that should earn its place.

Research Questions Before Interviews should name the decision in plain language. Research Questions Before Interviews: if the decision is actually three decisions, split it. Research Questions Before Interviews: if the decision has already been made, say that and use the artifact to clarify execution. Research Questions Before Interviews: if the decision is still open, make the options visible enough that people can argue about the real choice.

Research Questions Before Interviews should treat evidence with respect without worshiping it. Evidence has shape. Research Questions Before Interviews: a customer quote, usage trend, sales objection, churn pattern, or support signal can matter a lot, but each proves a different thing. Research Questions Before Interviews: the artifact should say what the evidence supports, what it does not support, and what would be strong enough to change the next move.

Research Questions Before Interviews should make the tradeoff impossible to miss. Research Questions Before Interviews: tradeoff language is the difference between a strategy document and an aspiration document. Research Questions Before Interviews: the team should know what receives less capacity, what waits, what gets cut, what risk is accepted, and which stakeholder will feel the cost.

How to inspect it

Research Questions Before Interviews can be inspected with four questions. What are we choosing? What are we refusing? Research Questions Before Interviews: what evidence would change our mind? Research Questions Before Interviews: what happens before the next review? Research Questions Before Interviews: if a team cannot answer those questions, the work is not yet ready for more process. Research Questions Before Interviews: it needs clearer judgment.

Research Questions Before Interviews should show up in the calendar. Research Questions Before Interviews: if the decision matters, it deserves a checkpoint. Research Questions Before Interviews: that checkpoint does not need to be heavy. Research Questions Before Interviews: it needs a defined signal, a real owner, and permission to change course. Research Questions Before Interviews: without that, the team will keep carrying the decision as background anxiety.

Research Questions Before Interviews should reduce the need for executive translation. Research Questions Before Interviews: a senior leader should be able to inspect the work without redoing the thinking. Research Questions Before Interviews: if the leader has to infer the customer, rebuild the evidence, guess the tradeoff, or identify the owner, the artifact is not doing enough operating work.

Field test

Research Questions Before Interviews can be tested on one live piece of work this week. Research Questions Before Interviews: pick something already consuming attention. Research Questions Before Interviews: rewrite it as a decision, not a status update. Research Questions Before Interviews: name the owner, the evidence, the tradeoff, and the review trigger. Research Questions Before Interviews: then ask what changed because the artifact exists.

Research Questions Before Interviews passes the test when the next action becomes more specific. Research Questions Before Interviews: the next action may be a customer call, a killed initiative, a narrower scope, a pricing review, a product bet, a launch decision, or a management conversation. Research Questions Before Interviews: the important part is that the work leaves the realm of explanation and re-enters contact with reality.

Evidence note: This is an operator-judgment essay grounded in Antoine's local source pack for Discovery and Customer Research Without Theater and adjacent series context, including https://www.antoinebuteau.com/building-ai-products-is-not-prompt-decoration/.

This is part 2 of 10 in Discovery and Customer Research Without Theater.