Arrive Ready: Walk In With a Wrong Answer on Purpose

I don’t walk into discovery asking “what do you need?” anymore. I walk in with a wrong answer on purpose.

Here’s what I learned the slow way. Blank-slate discovery feels thorough and is actually the least efficient way to find out what someone needs. You sit in a room, ask open-ended questions, and get vague answers — because people are genuinely bad at describing what they want in the abstract.

But they are instantly, ruthlessly good at “no, not that.”

So I flipped it. Before the first conversation, I use AI to build a hypothesis — a strawman of what I think they need, pulled together from their public materials, their industry, and systems I’ve seen solve the same problem. It’s deliberately a first draft. Half of it is probably wrong.

That’s the point. A wrong answer in the room gives people something to push against, and the corrections come fast and specific. “No, that step happens before this one.” “We’d never approve it that way.” In twenty minutes I learn what blank-slate discovery wouldn’t surface in three meetings.

Discovery stops being extraction and becomes validation.

AI didn’t make me faster at writing requirements. It made me able to arrive ready — with a point of view instead of a blank page.

That’s the whole shift.