Ask Meta Questions

A practical tool to help you become a world class communicator

Consider these two scenes which happen at tech companies around the world every day:

SCENE A 🤦

Customer: Do you support feature X? We can’t move forward unless you have it.

Teammate A: Umm, no. Our product doesn’t have feature X. Sorry.

Customer: That’s too bad. X is a requirement. We’re going to look for alternatives.

SCENE B 🤩

Customer: Do you support feature X?  We can’t move forward unless you have it.

Teammate B: Before I answer, can you tell me more about the need for feature X? How and why do you use it?

Customer: We need it for {customer explains their use case and what X enables}

Teammate B: That makes sense. While we don’t support feature X, we have feature Y that would fulfill most of your requirements. Here’s some info about it…

Customer: Great, we’ll take a look at Y and move forward.

What’s the difference between the scene where a customer continues to try your product and the one where they abandon and look for alternatives? 

The answer: meta questions.

Midjourney prompt: Crystal clear compelling communication modern art

🤔What are meta questions?

Meta questions help you understand the hidden motives behind questions others ask. You can think of meta questions as “the question behind the question”. Meta questions help you identify the most important thing for the person you’re communicating with. This helps you give them more useful answers that actually meet their needs.

Mastering meta questions will make you a prompt engineer, but for human intelligence instead of AI. Asking meta questions will make you a more effective communicator, whether you’re talking with external stakeholders like prospects or customers, or internal stakeholders like your sales, product or engineering teammates.

Meta questions reduce confusion. If there’s one thing remote work has taught us, it’s that communicating effectively async over Slack/Teams/email is hard! Meta questions help keep conversations focused bringing to light previously hidden or obscure motives, making it easier to arrive at decisions. Asking meta questions also helps unearth assumptions and easy to forget details, reducing the surface area for confusion when communicating remotely. 

Meta questions reveal context. They provide the right prompts for the other person to give you the bigger picture, with more details about why, who, what, where and when, which in turn help you provide more relevant answers to their questions.

Meta questions clarify purpose. Asking meta questions gives others the opportunity to explain their priorities and clarify why something is important to them. They help you better understand the hidden purpose behind their question, and their goals in general, enabling you to communicate with them in such a way that better fulfills their needs.

So ask meta questions. And communicate such that others don’t have to ask them to you.

So this week at work, before you give a yes/no answer to someone’s question, take a moment to step back and ask a meta question to help you understand more.

But if you really want to level up your communication, structure your communication such that others don’t have to ask you meta questions. Answer the meta questions beforehand! Give others relevant context, motivations and details such that it’s easy for them to give you the answers you need.

How do you ask good meta questions? By asking yourself “What am I really trying to do?”. WAYRTTD or What Are You Really Trying To Do is a useful tool for clearer thinking I learned from Shreyas Doshi, Product Manager extraordinaire. Asking yourself what you’re really trying to do helps put into words your purpose for communicating, and helps you identify implicit assumptions to make explicit.

I started asking WAYRTTD before sending out Slack messages to folks on my technical product marketing team.

Instead of asking for deliverables with messages like:

❌ Can you send me document X?

I put in an extra 2 minutes and started asking questions like this:

✅ Can you send me document X in the next hour? It’s okay if it’s not complete. I want to get a sense of where we are before my meeting with stakeholder X tomorrow morning.

This made communication with my team a lot more effective. Folks would often fulfill my request faster (no need to panic about the doc being unfinished and why I needed document X). But they would also often go above and beyond the ask by giving me additional context not contained in the requested doc that would help me with my meeting.

Happy meta questioning!

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