How to find the right questions
Find the right questions to ask using The Five Whys technique
Find the right questions to ask using The Five Whys technique
Key Takeaways
The Five Whys is a technique to find the root cause of problems.
The method can be applied to various areas and help us ask the right questions to solve complex problems.
This article shows a real-life example from these areas: engineering, product management, and user experience.
The Five Whys
The Five Whys is a problem-solving method used to identify the underlying issues of a specific problem. The technique suggests drilling down to the root cause by asking Why five times.
Once the root cause is known, a countermeasure can come into effect (contrary to dealing with the symptom).
Let’s see it in action in three different areas. In each section, I will cover –
Scenario — the background of the problem in question
Analysis — how asking the Five Whys can look like
Conclusions — what are the countermeasures to deal with the problem
My personal experience inspires the examples below.
Example 1 — Engineering
In the engineering world, things sometimes break. When they are, some teams are doing incident postmortem. Such a process aims to cover the root cause and underlying patterns so they can avoid it next time.
Let’s see it in action.
Scenario
In a high-scale product in an e-commerce eco-system, the price calculation was wrong for over an hour, causing incorrect charges.
Analysis
Q1: Why were there incorrect charges?
A: There were incorrect charges due to incorrect currency conversion. The issue was with all currencies that are not USD.
Q2: Why was the currency conversion incorrect?
A: The currency conversion service recently had an upgrade which probably caused the issue.
Q3: Why was the currency conversion service updated without seeing the incorrect charges?
A: After checking with the responsible team, their changes worked fine on the sandbox environment. They didn’t thoroughly test it on production after the deployment.
Q4: Why wasn’t the currency conversion service upgrade tested on production?
A: our teams cannot test production payments; the required infrastructure and capabilities are missing (e.g., credit card, bank account).
Q5: Why are we missing the capability to test production payments?
A: Payments are considered the Finance team area. We build the features in collaboration with them and assume they will also take ownership on their end.
Conclusions
Following the analysis above, we reach the following statement — “customers had incorrect charges for over an hour due to a lack of collaboration between the engineering and finance teams.”
The takeaway should be –
The engineering team needs the capability to test production payments.
The counter-measure to discuss further is –
How can we improve the collaboration between the engineering and external teams? How can we improve the ownership of each group?
Example 2 — Product Management
An essential part of product discovery is customer interviews. One of the challenges in these interviews is getting to the underlying problems the customer is trying to solve. Let’s see how the Five Whys technique can help us here.
Scenario
The product offers an all-in-one solution for business management. The product recently launched a payment option aiming to streamline the process of collecting payments. The following example tries to cover why the adoption rate of the feature is low.
Analysis
Q1: why have you stopped using the new payments feature?
A: I used it a few times, but eventually, I felt it didn’t match my processes
Q2: why isn’t the payments feature match your processes?
A: the collection of the payments is working fine, but what I do later gets complicated and requires manual work
Q3: Why do the actions after the payment collection require manual work?
A: With the previous software I used, the sync into my payments ERP was seamless. Now, I need to export a report and do it manually.
Q4: why do you need to export a report and do it manually?
A: my ERP is the place where all the accountings go. I saw you offered some connection, but it’s not good enough. Your product provides an excellent experience, but I can’t connect it to my ERP.
This case has no fifth question because we have reached the root cause. The next question is to discuss the best integration the product can offer that would engage with the payments feature once again.
Conclusions
Following the analysis above, we reach the following statement — “the payments feature has a low adoption rate because it is not synced well into the customer ERP system.”
The takeaway should be –
The product team should develop better ways to integrate with the ERP system.
The counter-measure to discuss further is –
How can we see the holistic user journey with external applications?
Example 3 — User Experience
I love seeing how products are being used. Tools that offer behavioral analysis (like screen recording) can pinpoint product misuse or awkward user journey.
We can dig deep into the journey using the Five Whys technique and find ways to improve it.
Scenario
In music apps that offer podcasts, one of the user goals is to find something to listen to as fast as possible. When analyzing the behavior with data tools, the time to find a podcast recently went up.
Let’s use the Five Whys to find out why.
Analysis
Q1: why did the time to find something to listen to went up?
A: Based on the analysis, the users are taking more time to check existing shows they previously listened to.
Q2: why are the users taking more time to check existing shows?
A: When checking their everyday actions, they mostly looked to see if there were new episodes.
Q3: why are there checking for new episodes?
A: from our analysis, we can tell the average user has five podcasts he listens to regularly. When he finds a new podcast, he reviews all the existing episodes and then mostly waits for new releases.
Q4:why is the customer waiting for new releases?
A: we don’t offer any indication of new episodes, so the user needs to find it himself.
Q5: why do we expect the user to find it by himself
A: When we initially developed this specific flow of podcasts, we looked at a different journey and persona. We didn’t account for this use case.
Conclusions
We can reach the following statement — “the time to find something to listen to went up since we didn’t consider the use case of waiting for new releases.”
The takeaway should be –
The user journey should account for the use case of waiting for new releases.
The counter-measure to discuss further is –
How about we visit more specific parts of the user journey where new use cases might appear?
With this in mind, we can think of ideas like push notifications for new episodes, a “newly added” section, and more.
Summary
Asking the right question is an art. Using the Five Whys technique, I showed how we could find the root cause of problems in different areas.
When finding the root cause, try and offer the countermeasure — what can we do in the future to solve this root cause?
The best way to do it is by starting right now! Think of a problem you face and ask yourself why five times. I’m sure you’ll find exciting results.