Why does Leading Questions matter?
This is the single most common way founder research produces confident, wrong conclusions. The damage is not that you get no information; it is that you get information that feels like validation, and then you build on it. A month of interviews conducted with leading questions is worse than no interviews, because it converts a hypothesis into a belief without ever testing it.
What does Leading Questions look like in practice?
"Do you find scheduling frustrating?" invites a yes, because being agreeable is easier than explaining that it is fine. "How many times did scheduling go wrong last week?" invites a fact, and "none that I noticed" is a real answer you can act on. The tell is simple: if you can predict the answer before asking, the question is not doing any work.
What are the common mistakes with Leading Questions?
- Describing the problem before asking whether they have it.
- Asking yes/no questions where yes is the polite answer.
- Following up only on answers that support the hypothesis, which turns a good interview into a bad one halfway through.
- Interviewing friends and investors, who are the most likely to be encouraging and the least likely to be customers.
Where the term comes from
The canonical demonstration is Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer's 1974 study. Subjects watched filmed car crashes and were asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other, or "hit" each other. The verb alone moved the speed estimates, and a week later the "smashed" group was more likely to report broken glass in a film that contained none.
Loftus & Palmer, "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction", 1974 ↗Related concepts
- Customer Discovery InterviewA conversation designed to learn what a potential customer actually does and struggles with, not to describe your product or ask whether they would buy it.
- Problem Validation vs. Solution ValidationTwo separate tests: whether the problem is real and painful enough that people already do something about it, and whether your particular solution is one they would use and pay for.