How we turned a two-day discovery workshop into forty minutes

Client discovery is mostly the same nine questions with different nouns. Automate the questions, keep the judgment.

After the fortieth kickoff workshop you notice something uncomfortable: you are asking the same nine questions, just with different nouns.

The pattern we kept seeing

The first screen is always the easy part. What separates the products that ship from the ones that stall at seventy percent is whether the hard decisions were made before the prompts started — auth before billing, the data model before the features.

We wrote this down because we kept giving the same advice. Decide the shape, then let the builder fill it in. The order is the product.

What we changed

Once the plan is explicit, every later prompt inherits it. Nothing drifts, nothing contradicts prompt three by prompt eleven, and when a decision changes the affected prompts are flagged — never silently rewritten.