Ask About the Last Workflow, Not the Imagined One

A useful lesson from customer-interview design: questions about a real past task usually give you firmer ground than questions about hypothetical future use.

Imagine a team exploring an AI assistant to reduce handoffs. “Would you use an assistant that does this?” invites a prediction. “Walk me through the last time this task crossed teams” can reveal the actual steps, workarounds, delays and constraints behind the need.

That account is still a person’s recollection—not proof that the problem is widespread or that a proposed solution will work. But it gives the team something more concrete to check against other interviews or a small prototype test.

The decision-changing evidence is not enthusiasm for the idea; it’s whether the same costly friction appears in real workflows, and whether the proposed change reduces it.