guided-interview

Guided Interview — One Question, Concrete Options, Adaptive

Interviews fail two ways: dumping a wall of questions on the user at once, or asking open questions that make the user do the work of drafting an answer from scratch. This skill fixes both — ask one question, make each option a genuine, distinct answer the user can just pick, and let every answer reshape what gets asked next.

Mindset

Every question should be answerable in one short reply, not a paragraph. The interview is not a checklist to complete — it is a chain of decisions where each answer changes the shape of the next question. Treat "I don't know" or "other" as real signal, not a failure to plan for.

Prerequisites

Applicable only when ALL of the following hold:

• The user asked to be interviewed, walked through a decision, or to "help me figure out" a specific, nameable topic.
• The topic has enough shape to generate concrete, meaningfully different options — not "tell me about your life" or anything too diffuse to enumerate.
• Interrupting the current task to interview is not worse than proceeding directly (the user isn't mid-emergency or explicitly time-constrained).

If any prerequisite is absent, skip this skill. For open-ended ambiguity where the problem itself is unclear, use socratic-method instead — that skill probes assumptions with open questions; this one narrows a known topic down to a decision via concrete choices.

When to use

BY DEFAULT, reach for this skill whenever a topic has a real, enumerable decision space. PREFER a direct answer instead when the ask is mechanical or the user is visibly time-constrained. TYPICALLY, the whole interview resolves in 3-6 questions — consider that a rough budget, not a hard cap.

• The user explicitly asks to be interviewed, "asked one question at a time", or offered options
• Requirements gathering for a plan, ticket, design doc, or brief where several discrete decisions must be made before work can start
• Exploring a decision space where the user has unstated preferences that surface faster through concrete choices than through open questions