01
IN
What has to be in front of you before this can start at all. Who supplies it, what it looks like when it turns up wrong, and what you do then.
“You just know” isn’t a spec.
It’s what you get when you ask the person who’s done the job for fifteen years how they decide. We get the rest of it onto paper, in their words.
01The problem
Nothing is missing. It has just never been said out loud.
Ask someone who has done a job for fifteen years how they decide which orders to turn away, and you will get “you just know”. They are not being difficult. The rule stopped feeling like a decision a long time ago. It runs the way changing gear runs, below the level anyone narrates.
So every questionnaire sent to that person comes back with the half of the job that still feels like decisions. The expensive half stays exactly where it was: the exceptions, the judgement calls, the thing everyone in the building knows and nobody has ever written down. Then it turns up as a change request.
People narrate the process as it is supposed to work. The paperwork records how it actually works. The gap between the two is the whole job.
02The technique
Correcting a wrong guess is far easier than filling a blank page.
So we arrive with guesses. Deliberately specific ones, about their work, that they can accept, reject or put right.
The open question
“How do you handle stock that arrives in boxes?”
“Depends, really. Bit of everything.”
The wrong guess
“I would assume a box marked twelve always has twelve in it. Is that fair?”
“God, no. Not from that supplier. We open every one of theirs and count them, and if it is short we photograph it before it goes on the shelf, because otherwise…”
A wrong guess pulls the sharpest correction of the session. That second answer contains three rules, a supplier exception and a photograph nobody would have thought to mention.
03The spine
Four moves, in the order that stops a big subject from sprawling.
It is the shape of any working system, said so that someone who has never written software can hold it in their head. The conversation still wanders, and that is where the good material is. The four moves are for filing what comes back, not for policing it.
02
PROCESS
What happens to it, and the rules that govern that, including the ones hiding behind the word “normally”.
03
OUT
What comes out, in what form, and who is on the other end of it expecting something specific.
04
CHECK
If this handed you a finished result, what would you look at first to decide whether to trust it?
CHECK is the one everyone skips, and it is where the expensive mistakes live. That last question, what would you look at first to decide whether to trust it, surfaces validation rules nothing else reaches.
04The delivery
The interview takes whatever shape reaches the person.
Self-served
A briefing they run on their own, in their own time, and send back a document. Good for people who are comfortable in a chat window and hard to get an hour from.
Facilitated
We sit with them, in person or on a call, and do the typing. The right default for anyone who would find “go to this site and paste this in” faintly bewildering.
On paper
A printed sheet for a shop floor, a site visit, a warehouse aisle. Somewhere a screen is the wrong instrument and a clipboard is a familiar object.
Live
They are in the room while the thing is being built, or relaying answers straight into the work. No handoff at all.
The shape is chosen from the stakeholder, not from what is convenient to produce. A beautiful kit nobody opens is worth less than a scrappy conversation that actually happens.
05Before anything gets built
Sometimes the honest answer is: do not build it.
Quoting, scheduling, invoicing, stock, bookings. There is usually a mature product already doing the job for a small monthly fee, and building a worse version of it is a real risk. We will say so out loud, once, and then respect the answer. Plenty of good reasons survive it.
Then the part that is actually useful: trial the off-the-shelf option for a fortnight, because the reasons you reject it are the requirements document.
- “It cannot do our two-man jobs.”
- “It will not let me quote per metre.”
- “It emails the customer and we use WhatsApp.”
That is a specification, reached faster and far more concretely than any interview would manage, and grounded in something you have actually put your hands on.
06Where it stops
The deliverable is a document, and then we stop.
Someone doing the job should read it and say “yes, that is our process”. Someone building should read the same document and know what to build. Those two are in tension less often than people assume. It carries the four moves, what is in scope and what is deliberately not, and the open questions, each with a name against it and a date.
What it does not carry is a data model, a stack or a timeline. Those are the next job. Deciding them before the person with the answers has been asked feels enormously helpful and reads as competence, but it puts a set of decisions in writing on behalf of someone nobody has spoken to, and written-down decisions get defended rather than examined.
07Two ways to ask
Whichever is less effort for you.
Send a note
A line about who holds the knowledge and what you are trying to get built. It opens as an email in your own account, ready to send.
Book a meeting
Pick a time that suits you. No preparation needed: bring the thing nobody can give you a straight answer on, and we will work out between us whether it is a conversation, a printed sheet or a session with the person who knows.