1 min lesson
Open with curiosity about the workflow
Tell someone how to act on this idea: "Lead with open questions about how the team actually builds and ships."
Step 1 of 3
Open with curiosity about the workflowdiscovery toolkit
Lead with open questions about how the team actually builds and ships. Vague answers hide the constraint, so you trade abstractions for last-week examples and numbers.
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Advanced table
Reference table
- What you ask
- Walk me through the last feature you shipped - where did it sit and wait?
- What it really probes
- Locates the real queue: review, testing, context-switching. Time spent waiting is the bottleneck.
- What you ask
- How much of an engineer's week goes to net-new code versus glue, tests and boilerplate?
- What it really probes
- Surfaces the toil Cursor's Agent and Tab actually remove, in hours you can later price.
- What you ask
- How are devs already using Cursor today and which teams haven't tried it?
- What it really probes
- Converts organic love into a named expansion path and a baseline to measure against.
- What you ask
- If onboarding a new hire took half as long, what would that be worth to you?
- What it really probes
- Turns "faster" into a number the engineering leader will own and defend internally.
- What you ask
- What happens to the roadmap if velocity stays flat for two more quarters?
- What it really probes
- Tests whether this is a funded problem or a nice-to-have you shouldn't forecast.
| What you ask | What it really probes |
|---|---|
| Walk me through the last feature you shipped - where did it sit and wait? | Locates the real queue: review, testing, context-switching. Time spent waiting is the bottleneck. |
| How much of an engineer's week goes to net-new code versus glue, tests and boilerplate? | Surfaces the toil Cursor's Agent and Tab actually remove, in hours you can later price. |
| How are devs already using Cursor today and which teams haven't tried it? | Converts organic love into a named expansion path and a baseline to measure against. |
| If onboarding a new hire took half as long, what would that be worth to you? | Turns "faster" into a number the engineering leader will own and defend internally. |
| What happens to the roadmap if velocity stays flat for two more quarters? | Tests whether this is a funded problem or a nice-to-have you shouldn't forecast. |
Each question trades a comfortable abstraction for a concrete fact you can build a business case on.
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Optional practice
Practice: Open with curiosity about the workflow
QWhich is the strongest discovery question for sizing developer-productivity pain?