Good questions underpin good leadership. Founders who ask powerful questions have the greatest success in both seizing opportunities and dealing with unexpected challenges. Organizations that will thrive in the future are those that urge everyone to learn faster and make better decisions. Velocity of decision-making is a leading indicator of success. Good decision-making is a function of questions. You can’t find the right answers without asking the proper questions.

There are two types of questions: essential questions and guiding questions. Essential questions are based on the broad topics (lynchpin ideas) that are common to all aspects of the company. Guiding questions provide focus and direction in answering the essential questions and are linked to a specific area of the business.

What is an essential question?

Simply put, an essential question is a definition question, serving as an umbrella for other guiding questions. It frames the organizing center and promote higher-level thinking. It helps link concepts and principles and anchor them. And it is broad enough to encompass a hierarchical structure within.

The process of identifying essential questions forces founders to explicitly identify what matters for their business and more importantly, why it matters. Essential questions serve as a prioritizing filter. They help keep the most important things front and center. You can’t answer essential questions with superficial understanding, they are a forcing function to dig deeper, consider alternatives, weight evidence, and support ideas. Essential questions help founders define the mission and vision of the company.

Some examples of essential questions:

What is wrong with the world and how do you intend to fix it?

What will the world look like after you’ve finished changing it?

What are the underlying assumptions that support your views?

Essential questions are not something you revisit each week, but to ignore them in perpetuity is perilous. These points of inquiry, are the big ideas and enduring understandings that underpin a founders vision, and reflect their unique insights and intuitive sense. Underneath essential questions are the guiding questions.

What are guiding questions?

Guiding questions are the who, what, when, where, how questions that inform a companies daily work. Guiding questions are where the rubber meets the road. They drive the practical decisions and actions of building your product, and shed light on how customers view the world and their problems.

Asking guiding questions helps founders to move to higher levels of thinking by providing an open-ended structure that calls attention to key and/or missing elements in their thinking. Guiding questions promote conceptual thinking and add coherence to a companies decision-making process.

The right set of guiding questions will be unique for each company. But there are several that all early-stage startups must answer. For example, before a company builds an MVP they should be able to answer the following five questions:

1. Who are you building this product for?
2. What high-priority problem do you solve for that customer?
3. What value do customers get by solving this problem?
4. What is the unique thing your product does to solve this problem and deliver this value in a way that is more useful or valuable than existing solutions.
5. Where are customers looking for your solution and what are the features customers expect from products in that category?

Good guiding questions are multi-faceted, and should lead to many additional questions. To get a better sense of how this questions hierarchy works, below are some example supporting questions for each guiding question.

1. What high-priority problem do you solve for that customer?

   • What do people struggle with? Be as specific as possible (e.g. customers struggle with pens vs customers have to repeatedly draw meaningless circles for 1.5 minutes before ink comes out of the pen and is usable)!
   • When do they have this problem?
   • How often?
   • In what environments?
   • How painful is it?
   • How have they tried to solve it?

2. Who are you building this product for?

   • Who are those people? Some demographics might be helpful, but more often we are looking for behaviors and use cases to describe these people (e.g. in the pen example above, everyone who needs to write something could qualify, but we can maybe be more specific like students who have hand written notes or things like that)
   • Who feels this pain point?
   • Who looks like the right person, but isn’t? (Reference)
   • Is the person who is using the product/feeling the pain, also the person who can buy your product? If not (as is often the case), who are the other people involved in the buying process? How do the internal stakeholders communicate the value of the product?

3. What value do customers get by solving this problem?

   • Why is the problem worth solving?
   • What are the incentives to solve it?
   • Why is a solution worth ‘buying’ vs ‘building?’
   • What are the optimal solutions to this problem (assuming no constraints)?

4. What is the unique thing your product does to solve this problem and deliver this value in a way that is more useful or valuable than existing solutions.

   • The answer to this question is your Unique Product Attribute — the only part of your product that truly needs to be innovative. This innovation can take many forms, but it should be clearly defined.
   • Your Unique Product Attribute is the crux your entire startup. If you can nail it, you’ve got a great shot of winning the entire market opportunity. If you fail to build it, you fail overall. The goal of building an MVP is to prove that you can deliver Unique Product Attributes that are useable, valuable, feasible, and viable.
   • The Unique Product Attribute is the only part of your solution that actually needs to be innovative. This innovation is the heart of the hypothesis you’ll test with your MVPIt can take many forms, but , so it should be clearly defined.
   • What is the difference between the proposition and the product?

5. Where are customers looking for your solution and what are the features customers expect from products in that category?

   This is where you define what to include in your MVP and what to leave out.

   • What other solutions are in market?
   • Who in the org is the buyer? Is the buyer a different person/group than the regular users?
   • What business models map well to the problem space?
   • What are the GTM opportunities?

   Successfully connecting your product with customers requires more than filling in the blanks on a positioning statement. How you position your product is the foundation for all of your marketing and sales efforts. It is the keystone of your go-to-market strategy.

   • What should be included/excluded in your MVP and what are the non-differentiated but must have elements of your solution that will need to be built for customers to even consider your solutions viable?

Intuition is an important skill, it helps us take action in the face of uncertainty, and discover insights efficiently. If our intuition helps us decide where we want to go, questions are the compass we use to stay on course. Questions allow us to support our intuition with data. Turning our gut feeling about something into an earned insight.

Opportunity costs are the most pernicious and hard-to-define costs for startups. Good research hygiene can help to avoid obvious missteps and increase quality and pace of a teams decision-making. While these questions looks simple enough, they require organization and effort to confidently answer. A sound research process will maximize the value of good questions, and help founders manage customer feedback as their company scales.

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Research Process