Asking “Why?”

How to make decisions without Specifications

“Why?” is a very powerful question to ask and asking why is a technique that I encourage everyone to use liberally. The answers to “Why?” build understanding and provide context while having the potential to uncover hidden truths and gems of wisdom. If you are being asked “Why?”, you have an opportunity to test your own understanding and ideas by having to justify your position.

Yesterday one of my teams was about to kick off a ticket to add configurable colour options for a pre-MVP product, it was straight forward and they could have built user preferences, alternate colour schemes and option boxes in a few days. But instead, they asked “Why?”. As the team discussed the idea, someone said ‘Because we don’t want colour blind people to have a negative first impression of our product’ and someone else said ‘Because if our colours don’t match the applications they are used to, they may find it difficult to start using our product’. Asking “Why?” resulted in the team thinking deeply about their product, what they were trying to achieve and who they were building it for. Ultimately the team decided that it would be better to spend time evaluating and testing colour schemes to find a default that was accessible for users and was not too far removed from the industry norms, this means less coding, less clutter in the app and a simplified, superior experience for users.

Every day team members designing, coding and testing our products make hundreds of decisions that will impact the product experience. It should be obvious to all but the most die-hard waterfall proponents that it is not possible to specify in advance the answers to those thousands of questions for every feature and so the team needs to have the understanding and context to make those decisions as they arise. Understanding why they are building something and knowing who they are building it for will provide the information they need to make those decisions effectively.

Be careful with how you ask “Why?”, it can be challenging and confronting, particularly if someone is making decisions based on intuition, in this case you will need to build understanding collaboratively and may need to seek additional input data to guide you.

However you achieve it, make sure you understand why you are doing the work before you start, otherwise you will almost certainly have to do it again.