✦ PLAYBOOK

How to ask good questions

Asking questions is easy — asking good questions requires a little more effort. As we only have time to answer one to three questions during demos, we encourage everyone to ask good ones.

Listen

We don't want to ask questions that have already been answered. If you were in and out of the room and missed part of the demo, we encourage you to ask the question privately.

Is this question specific to me?

Remember, we want demos to benefit most of the audience — if not everyone. If you have a very specific question, we encourage you to ask it privately. e.g. “I'm building X, how can I implement your strategy onto what I'm working on?”

Challenging the demo-er

There's no one right way to build a startup or product. However, sometimes it's good to give the demo-er a challenging question. As demos are short, when it's relevant, challenging questions can help the audience better understand the demo-er's perspective on how they chose to do what they did. Sometimes challenging questions can come off personal — so we encourage you to ask from your personal understanding and source of truth.

Instead of“Why did you use X over Y?”

We want“From my experience Y was better than X — what made you choose X?”

Characteristics of good questions

—Keep questions short and concise.
—Ask open-ended questions — avoid yes-or-no questions.
—Lean towards what and how questions over why.
—Ask one question at a time — we have limited time, and don't want to overwhelm the demo-er.
—Be compassionate — don't give a first-time demo-er a hard time.

Occasionally we have perfect demos and there are no questions. This is a good opportunity to ask reflective questions:

“From what you've learned here, how would you do things differently moving forward?”