Why the three asks cannot be compared yet
Session b1 put three asks on your desk. Sales wants live in-meeting notes, and offers "every demo asks for it" plus three lost deals. Support wants post-meeting summaries, and offers 214 tickets in three months tagged "cannot find what was decided" - the second most common tag in the queue. The CEO wants an agent, and offers nothing at all. Every one of those is a reasonable thing for that person to want, and not one of them is a problem statement.
The gap matters because ranking is impossible across different units. A lost deal is not commensurable with a ticket tag, and neither is commensurable with a strategic feeling. b6 does the prioritisation, but prioritisation is arithmetic on comparable inputs, and this session is where the inputs get made comparable. By the end, all three asks are written in the same six-part shape, and the differences between them are visible instead of rhetorical.
A request is not a problem 6 min live
Nobody brings you a problem. People bring you requests, and a request is the output of somebody else's private thinking: they noticed something, formed a theory about the cause, picked a fix, and handed you the fix. The problem is the middle step, and it never survives the journey. That is not a criticism of your stakeholders - it is what being helpful looks like. It does mean the first thing you receive is always the least useful of the three.
Written out for Cadence's three asks, the smuggled solution is easy to see once you look for it. The third column is deliberately hedged: at this point in the session it is a hypothesis about what the request might be pointing at, not a finding. Turning column three into something checkable is the rest of the page.
| The ask, as it arrived | The solution smuggled inside it | The problem it might be pointing at |
|---|---|---|
| Sales: "we need live notes in the meeting" | a streaming transcription pipeline and an in-call UI | something in the demo fails to land, and the prospect cannot picture the value while watching |
| Support: "we need post-meeting summaries" | generated summaries, one per meeting, delivered somewhere | after a meeting ends, admins cannot locate the decision inside what was recorded |
| CEO: "we should have an agent" | an autonomous system acting on meetings on a user's behalf | unknown - no user, no moment, no failure and no frequency were named in the ask |
LiveWhy every ask arrives pre-shaped as a solution4 min▶
There are three reasons, and knowing which one you are looking at changes how you respond:
- A solution is concrete and a problem is abstract. "Add live notes" is a sentence anybody can picture. "Prospects cannot evaluate asynchronous value during a synchronous demo" is a sentence that gets you asked to speak plainly. People bring the version that communicates.
- They have already done the thinking, just privately. The salesperson watched a prospect's face change. That observation is the most valuable thing in the room and it is not in the ask - it got compressed out on the way to you.
- Naming a solution is how influence works in most companies. A request for a feature can be tracked, escalated and won. A description of a problem cannot. If your org only rewards feature requests, you will only receive feature requests, and that is an org design fact rather than a personal failing.
Self-studyWhere AI genuinely helps at this stage3 min read▶
This is a drafting problem with a judgement problem hiding inside it, so the split from b1 applies cleanly. Three uses that are worth the time:
- Draft the problem statement six ways. Same evidence, six framings, from narrow to broad. You are not looking for the best prose - you are looking for the framing whose implications you disagree with, because that disagreement is where your real belief about the problem is hiding.
- Ask for the counter-argument. "Argue that this is not a problem worth solving this quarter, using only the numbers above." A tool with no stake in the outcome writes this far more honestly than you will, and it takes about a minute.
- Ask what would have to be true. "List everything that must hold for this statement to be correct." You get back a list of assumptions, some of which you can check today and had not thought to check.
And the hard line: it must never supply the evidence. Ask why admins lose decisions and you will get five fluent, plausible reasons, none of which came from an admin. That failure has its own session, because it is the expensive one - b3 stages it deliberately.
A problem statement someone could disagree with 7 min live
The bar is not "true". Almost anything vague is true. The bar is disagreeable: a colleague who knows the product should be able to read your statement and say "I think the frequency is wrong" or "that is not the segment where this bites". If the only available response is agreement, you have written something nobody can argue with because there is nothing in it to argue about.
LivePart 6 is the one that changes the room4 min▶
Parts 1 to 5 make the statement specific. Part 6 - how we know - is the one that changes what happens in the meeting, for a slightly uncomfortable reason: it is the part that can be empty, and an empty box on a shared page is a fact rather than an accusation.
- It moves the argument off the person. "I do not think we should build an agent" is a position that has an opponent. "The evidence line for the agent is blank" is a description of a document, and the person who brought the ask can fill it in.
- It makes the next step obvious. A blank evidence line is not a rejection - it is a research task with a named owner and a size. Sometimes it takes a day to fill.
- It protects you later. When the quarter goes badly, the question is always "why did we build that". A written evidence line answers it, and so does a written blank one, in a different and more useful way.
LiveInterrogating an ask without making an enemy4 min▶
The whole technique is one substitution: ask for the instance, not the opinion. Opinions have to be defended, so asking about one starts a contest. Instances just get recounted, and recounting is a friendly act.
| Do not ask | Ask instead | What you get back |
|---|---|---|
| "Do you really think that would have won those deals?" | "Which deals, and what did the buyer actually say?" | three names and some quotes, or an honest "let me check" |
| "Is every demo really asking for it?" | "Can you send me the last five demos where it came up?" | a countable set, which converts an assertion into data |
| "Why do you want an agent?" | "Who would use it, and what would they stop doing?" | either a real user and moment, or a visible gap |
| "Do we have evidence for this?" | "What did you see that made you think of this?" | the observation that got compressed out of the ask |
Two habits make this land rather than sting. First, ask the same questions of your own favourite idea, out loud, in the same meeting - the questions read as a standard rather than a challenge once people have watched you fail them. Second, when someone cannot produce the instance, do not win. Write "to be checked" in the evidence line and offer to check it with them. You want the practice to survive the meeting, not the point.
The three grades of evidence a PM actually gets 6 min live
Product decisions almost never run on one clean kind of evidence. They run on a mixture of three, and the mixture is fine - what is not fine is a mixture presented as though it were all one grade. Naming the grade takes four words and removes most of the disagreement in a product review, because a surprising amount of that disagreement is two people arguing at different grades without noticing.
| Grade | What it is | Cadence example | What it can and cannot settle |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · counted behaviour | something a system recorded happening, countable without asking anyone | 214 tickets in 3 months; week-1 revisit rate of 11%; accuracy complaints on 1.4% of meetings | settles whether and how often. Cannot settle why, and cannot see anything you never instrumented |
| 2 · reported behaviour | what people say they did, in their own words, about a specific past occasion | 6 of 8 interviewed admins never reopen a transcript; 68% of surveyed admins still take their own notes | settles why and what it costs them. Cannot settle scale, and drifts toward the tidier story |
| 3 · asserted belief | a confident claim with no instance attached, often from someone with good instincts | "every demo asks for it"; "everyone is shipping agents"; three lost deals offered but not yet examined | settles nothing on its own. Useful as a pointer to where to go looking, dangerous as a reason to build |
LiveGrade 3 is not the enemy - unlabelled grade 3 is4 min▶
A senior person's instinct is genuinely informative. They have seen hundreds of customer conversations and their pattern-matching is often right, which is exactly why the unlabelled version is dangerous rather than merely wrong.
- Labelled, it is a hypothesis with a sponsor. "My read, no data yet, is that live notes are what closes the demo" is a useful sentence. It says what it is, and it tells you what to go and count.
- Unlabelled, it outranks everything else in the room. Confidence plus seniority reads as evidence, and 214 counted tickets quietly lose to a strongly stated feeling. Nobody in the room did anything wrong; the units were simply never compared.
- Escalation launders the grade. An assertion that travels through three retellings arrives sounding like a finding. "Sales says every demo asks for it" becomes "demos are asking for it" becomes "there is demand for live notes". Each step drops a hedge.
Self-studyTwo traps inside grade 1 and grade 23 min read▶
Grading is not a ladder where higher always wins. Both of the upper grades have failure modes that a confident number happily hides:
- Counted behaviour only counts what you instrumented. Cadence's 11% revisit rate is a real number about a real event, and it says nothing about admins who solved the problem outside the product entirely - the ones who retype three lines into a chat channel and never come back. The most important behaviour in a product is often the behaviour that leaves no event.
- A ticket tag is a taxonomy decision, not a fact. "Cannot find what was decided" being the second most common tag partly reflects how the support team labels things. Before that number carries a quarter, someone should read thirty of the tickets. That is a two-hour job and it has changed the meaning of a headline number more than once.
- Reported behaviour drifts toward coherence. People are not lying; they are constructing a tidy narrative from a messy week. This is why story-based interviewing asks "walk me through the last time" rather than "what do you usually do", and why "would you use this?" is not evidence of anything at all.
Which is the honest summary of the whole grading exercise: it tells you what a claim can carry, not whether the claim is correct. b3 takes the grade 2 pile - eight interviews - and shows how it fails when a synthesis is trusted without verification.
The three asks, rewritten ★ real text to judge
This is the output of the session: an opportunity brief with one entry per ask, each in the same six-part shape and each carrying its evidence grade. Read all three, then notice what the layout does on its own - nobody had to say the awkward thing, because the awkward thing is now a blank field on a shared page.
Take the ask verbatim first. Write it in the requester's words, with their name on it, before you touch anything. This is a courtesy that pays for itself: they will read the brief, and the first thing they look for is whether you heard them.
Extract the smuggled solution and set it aside. Name it explicitly on a separate line. Not to reject it, but so that it stops being the thing under discussion. It becomes a candidate again in b4, alongside alternatives the ask did not mention.
Fill the six parts, leaving blanks blank. Who, what they are trying to do, what breaks, how often, what it costs, how we know. Resist the urge to make a thin line sound thicker - the whole value of the brief is that thin lines look thin.
Grade the evidence in one word. Counted, reported, asserted, or none yet. Where grades are mixed, list each source with its own grade rather than averaging them into a vague "strong signal".
Write the cheapest next check. For every blank and every grade 3, one line: what would settle this, and roughly how long it takes. A brief that ends in three cheap checks is a brief that survives the meeting.
Ask, verbatim: "We need post-meeting summaries." (Support lead) · Solution set aside: generated summaries, one per meeting.
Problem statement. Team admins on paid workspaces of 5 to 50 seats are trying to arrive at their next meeting knowing what was agreed in the last one. What breaks is that the decision exists as roughly three lines inside a 40-minute transcript, and the product offers no way to get to those lines without re-reading. This happens on effectively every recurring meeting: 6 of the 8 admins interviewed never reopen a transcript once the meeting ends, and the week-1 revisit rate across all recorded meetings is 11%. It costs them a manual re-read, a retyped note somewhere else, or the decision itself, quietly lost. We know this from 214 support tickets in 3 months tagged "cannot find what was decided" (the second most common tag), 8 interviews with paid-workspace admins, the 11% revisit rate, and a survey in which 68% of admins say they still take their own notes during meetings.
Cheapest next check: read 30 of the 214 tickets and confirm they are not concentrated in a handful of accounts. Half a day.
Ask, verbatim: "Every demo asks for it - we need live notes in the meeting." (Sales) · Solution set aside: streaming transcription with an in-call view.
Problem statement. Prospects evaluating Cadence in a live demo are trying to judge whether it will change their meetings. What breaks is unclear: the claim is that seeing nothing happen during the call weakens the demo, but no instance of that has been examined. Frequency is stated as "every demo" and is not counted. Cost is offered as three lost deals. We know this from a sales assertion plus three deal names; we do not know which deals, what the buyer actually said, or whether live notes were a factor in any of them.
Cheapest next check: read the notes on those three deals and ask the account owner what the buyer said, in their words. Under two hours, and it either upgrades this brief to grade 2 or it does not.
Ask, verbatim: "We should have an agent." (CEO) · Solution set aside: an autonomous system acting on meetings on a user's behalf.
Problem statement. Who: not specified. What they are trying to do: not specified. What breaks today: not specified. How often: not specified. What it costs: not specified. How we know: no evidence offered.
Cheapest next check: one 20-minute conversation, asking a single question - what did you see that made you think of this? Strategic instinct from a founder is a real signal about the market, and it is grade 3 until somebody names a user and a moment. That is a research task, not a verdict.
The empty field does the work that no human in the room wanted to do. In the meeting, "there is no evidence for the agent" is a sentence with a target, and most people will simply not say it to a founder. The same content, rendered as a row where five fields read "not specified" and the sixth reads "no evidence offered", is not an attack on anyone - it is a description of a document, sitting next to two other rows in the same format. Nobody has to be brave.
And notice what it does not say. It does not say do not build an agent. It says that as written, the ask cannot be ranked against a brief carrying 214 tickets and eight interviews, because there is nothing in it to rank. The next move is a research task with an owner and a size, which is a real answer and a much better outcome for the person who brought the ask than a polite yes followed by two quarters of nothing. The ranking itself is b6's job, and by then all three of these will be in the same units.
Your turn: grade, unpack, rewrite ★ 8 min
Three exercises on real-sounding material. Do the first two in session, out loud, with disagreement encouraged.
LiveQ1 · Grade these four claims3 min▶
One word each: counted, reported, asserted, or none yet. Say your answer before you read the verdict.
| Claim | Grade | Why, and what it is worth |
|---|---|---|
| "Week-1 transcript revisit rate is 11% of recorded meetings." | counted | a real event count. Note there is no target and never has been, so 11% is a fact with no verdict attached. Whether 11% is bad is a judgement, not a measurement |
| "68% of surveyed admins still take their own notes during meetings." | reported | a survey is self-report, so it carries why-ish information and unreliable scale. Strong here because it contradicts the product's core promise, which is a hard thing for a survey to produce by accident |
| "Enterprise buyers will not adopt this without live notes." | asserted | confident, plausible, no instance. Worth exactly one question: which buyer said that, and when? |
| "Admins would prefer a summary in their chat tool." | asserted, disguised as reported | the trap. "Would prefer" is a prediction about the future, and no amount of asking makes it evidence. If one admin said it, that is one anecdote about one workflow. b3 takes this exact failure apart |
The fourth is the one worth arguing about. "Would you use it" and "would you prefer" produce answers that sound like reported behaviour and are actually asserted belief - the interviewee's, not the stakeholder's, but asserted all the same.
LiveQ2 · Unpack an ask without the fight3 min▶
An engineering lead says: "we should let admins export everything to CSV, people keep asking." Write the three questions you would actually ask, then compare.
- "Which people, and where did they ask?" - converts "keep asking" into a countable set, or reveals there is not one. Neutral, because it sounds like you are going to go and read them.
- "What did the last person say they were going to do with the file?" - the instance question. Export is almost always a workaround for something the product does not do, and the workaround tells you the job. This is the question that most often changes what gets built.
- "What made you think of this now?" - the compressed observation. Something happened this week.
Notice that none of the three contains the word "why", and none of them requires the other person to defend a position. Also notice what you did not do: you did not say no, and you did not say yes. You collected the instance, and the ask either gets stronger or quietly stops being urgent.
Self-studyQ3 · Your carried item, in six parts4 min▶
Take the backlog item you picked in b1 - the one that gets argued about and never decided - and write it in the six-part shape. Fill what you can, leave the rest genuinely blank, and grade each source in one word.
Then read the blanks, because they are the finding. In most cases the reason the argument keeps restarting is visible in exactly one place: either the frequency is unknown, so nobody can size it, or the whole thing rests on grade 3 that everybody has been treating as grade 1. If you can fill the blank in under a day, you have found the cheapest useful piece of work on your desk this week. If it would take a month, that is a real answer too, and it belongs in the brief.
Try it yourself - this week ◐ 20-30 min total
- Write your carried backlog item as a six-part problem statement, blanks left blank, and one word of evidence grade per source. One page, no more.
- Add an "evidence grade" line to your team's problem or brief template, with the four allowed values: counted, reported, asserted, none yet. Nothing else about the template needs to change.
- Take the loudest ask currently on your desk and ask only for the instance: which one, and what did they say. Write down what came back, including "let me check".
- Draft your problem statement six ways with an AI tool, from narrow to broad, then keep the one whose implications you disagree with. That disagreement is your actual belief about the problem, and it is worth more than the prose.
- For every blank and every grade 3 in your statement, write the cheapest next check and how long it takes. Bring the blanks to b3 - that session is about not filling them with plausible fiction.
Sources covered
Full source map in materials/official-course-map.md. This page covers:
Three questions before you go 🎯 ◐ 90 seconds
1 · A stakeholder says "we need live notes in the meeting". What have you actually received?
Requests are the end of somebody else's thinking. The valuable part - what they saw that made them think of this - got dropped, because a solution is concrete and communicates, and a problem is abstract and does not. Your first move is to go and get the observation back.
2 · "Every demo asks for it, and we lost three deals over it." What grade is this, and what is the next move?
Most escalations are grade 3 wearing grade 1's clothes. A number inside an assertion does not make it counted; "every" is uncounted and the three deals have not been read. The whole move costs under two hours and it is a favour to the person who brought the ask, not a challenge to them.
3 · In the opportunity brief, the CEO's agent has "no evidence offered" written in its evidence line. What has that achieved?
A blank evidence line is not a verdict. Founder instinct is often right and is genuinely informative about the market - it is simply grade 3 until somebody names a user and a moment. Written down beside two other briefs in the same format, it becomes comparable and cheaply checkable, and nobody in the room had to be the one to doubt a colleague out loud.