Ask about past behavior, never about future preferences. Get people to walk you through the last time they hit the problem, what they did instead, what it cost them, and what tools were open at the time. Then hunt for workarounds, because spreadsheets, side tools, and repeated manual steps are the strongest signal of an unmet need that a user will never phrase as a feature request.
Why interviewers ask this
Discovery is the part of the job most easily faked, so interviewers probe the actual mechanics. They want to hear behavioral questioning rather than preference questioning, a bias toward observing over asking, and evidence you have translated a vague request into a narrow, buildable problem. A candidate who talks about surveys and feature voting without mentioning a single conversation signals that they take orders rather than find problems.
How to structure your answer
- Say you ask about the last occurrence, not about wishes.
- List the concrete questions: when, what did you do instead, what did it cost.
- Explain why workarounds are the highest value signal.
- Give one example of a vague ask you narrowed into a real requirement.
Example answer
I never ask what people want, because they will politely invent something. I ask them to walk me through the last time they had the problem. When did it happen, what were you doing right before, what did you do instead, how long did that take. Past behavior is the only thing they can report accurately. The most useful thing I look for is the workaround, because a workaround is a user telling you what they need with their actions rather than their words. On one product I kept hearing requests for better reporting, which is a useless ask. But when I asked people to show me their last report, four out of six exported to a spreadsheet and did the same three pivots by hand every Monday. That was the real requirement, and it was much narrower than better reporting. We shipped those three pivots as a saved view and the requests stopped.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How many interviews before you trust a pattern?
- How do you recruit the users who are not already fans?
- How do you keep discovery running while you are shipping?
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