❗The 7-step checklist to ask a great question (People will always answer)

Learn how to ask questions effectively at work to boost productivity, save time, and enhance communication. Make your questions clear, specific, and actionable

It’s impossible to know it all.

That’s why companies hire many employees instead of having a single one per role.

It’d be a big waste of resources if every employee tried to figure out the same problem on their own.

Instead, you want people to ask questions and share this information efficiently.

Get good at your questions and you’ll have all the information at your fingertips.

#1 Make it straightforward

Stories give you only tidbits of information. They keep you yearning for more so you read the next chapter.

At work, you don’t want that. You want to get your point through with as few words as possible.

Invert the order. Don't give context first and conclusion last. Instead, provide the conclusion upfront and later add all supporting arguments.

We are deprecating our service and all clients have to migrate to its replacement.
Hello team, as part of <>

#2 Make it actionable

In social media writing, you’ll write a hook, do some storytelling and finally provide a call to action (CTA).

At work, you want the action stated first, and the rest of the text later.

Most of the times, you’ll find the supporting context is not needed. This is very obvious when asking a verbal question. Sometimes people take action without listening to all the supporting arguments.

Start with the CTA, provide context if needed, and remind the CTA at the end.

We need to refactor the component, creating a V2 version.
While working on my task, I found <>
So I’m proposing to refactor into a V2 version

#3 Make it specific

When asking for multiple things, the most productive way is to enumerate the requests.

This allows the responder to ask for clarification about specific items if needed.

Hello, in <> team we need the following:

1. Approve the connectivity request to your service

2. Approve the PR we have submitted to allowlist our accounts

3. Do you have documentation about the SLAs of your service?

#4 Make it filtered

When posting to a big audience, like an email list, you don’t want to lose people’s time reading something they don’t care about.

Use the first line to point out the criteria for people to require to keep reading

If you are not consuming the event ORDER_PROCESSED, you can stop reading
Hello, <>

#5 Make it public

Don’t ask in private a question that many people can benefit from. That’s hiding information from people in the same company.

There are many public forums to ask questions: Tickets in an intake backlog, slack channels, internal forums…

When asking, add the tags and keywords necessary for others to find easily.

And when you solve the problem, get back to the question and point out the solution. It’s not the same to have an answer to something that may work as an answer to something that worked

#6 Make it once and for all

Before you ask a question, consider someone else may have faced the problem before.

Make a search to find the answer. We focus on Don’t Repeat Yourself in code, even if we didn’t write the two repeated pieces of code.

The same with questions. Don’t ask something someone else asked before.

#7 Make it transparent

You want to show you did your homework.

But that’s not the main purpose of asking a question. The purpose is to get the question answered.

Showing your failed attempts can help people identify what you are missing.

And it’s a credibility boost. People hate dedicating their time to those who don’t dedicate their time themselves.

🎯 Conclusion

Questions are a tool.

Everybody has them in their toolbox. But most people don’t know how to use them.

You’ll achieve more impact. You’ll get faster at completing your work. And you’ll save resources from across the company

There’s no downside to learning how to ask good questions.

And there’s no downside to reading either. Consider the book The Pyramid Principle

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