Asb Interview Questions

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:

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