3 Interview Tactics That Force Stakeholders to Stop Saying ‘Just Make It Better
Fuzzy input costs time. These 3 interview tactics turned vague requests into sharp, usable requirements. I cut 20% of rework time and sped up delivery. Fewer rewrites. Cleaner specs. Start here.
A global pharma client once told me they wanted the safety reporting screen to feel "cleaner."
That was it.
I nodded, asked a few polite questions, and filled in the rest. It looked fine to me. But two days later, clinical reviewers flagged layout issues, audit trails broke in UAT, and devs pushed back on rework tickets they never agreed to.
I couldn’t blame them. I’d walked in with no structure, hoping we’d figure it out live.
That’s not collaboration. It’s roulette.
Most stakeholder interviews feel casual, but they’re anything but.
PMI’s 2025 report says 75 percent of BAs get vague inputs. Rework hits one in five specs.
It’s not just time lost. It makes you look like you don’t listen.
Three tactics fixed this for me. One clarified an entire module in under 30 minutes. If your last stakeholder session felt like improv, keep reading.
Would your last interview pass that bar?
Where Interviews Fall Apart
It usually breaks before the call even starts.
Not because the stakeholder is hard to work with. Because we treat interviews like status chats.
We ask soft questions.
We show up without a framework.
We forget they don’t think in systems.
Still asking “What do you want?”
You may as well flip a coin and pick a feature.
Stakeholders talk in reactions, not requirements. If you don’t shape the conversation, you’ll be decoding it for days.
And half the time, they’re not even the end user.
So if you're skipping context, you're not writing a spec. You're just recording a wish.
Tactic 1: Use the 5Ws Before You Ever Touch “How”
Never start with “How should it work?” That’s the tail end of the process.
Ask: Who’s using it? What’s going wrong? Why now? When does it matter? Where’s the actual pain?
I once heard, “We want faster reporting.”
I asked, “Why does speed matter?”
They said, “Because Health Canada rejects anything that loads past five seconds.”
That gave us a timing constraint, an API limit, and a clear dev priority.
All from one “why.”
Ask like you’re building, not just collecting.
Tactic 2: Frame Their Story with STAR
Stakeholders ramble when there’s no shape to the conversation.
Use the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Result.
Instead of, “What’s wrong with submission flows?”
Try, “Tell me about the last time it broke.”
Then walk it out:
What were you doing?
What did you expect?
What actually happened?
What did it break?
That got me a goldmine once: hidden redirect loop knocking out a third of daily reports. Never showed up in logs. STAR pulled it in five minutes.
When was the last time a simple reframe saved you hours?
Tactic 3: Validate Live with Barebones Prototypes
Words fail more than you think.
Mockups don’t need polish. They just need to exist.
Mid-call once, I showed a hand-sketched dashboard.
30 minutes in, the stakeholder flagged 4 problems—none of which had come up before. We fixed them before dev even saw the ticket.
Change requests dropped by a quarter.
Not luck. Just a visual gut check, early and ugly.
Good Interviews Don’t Just Save Time. They Build Trust.
These tactics—5Ws, STAR, live validation—cut more than 10 hours of waste across four projects. But more importantly, they changed how I was seen.
I wasn’t the follow-up email person anymore.
I was the one who understood it the first time.
You don’t need a full toolkit to start.
Just pick one tactic and use it in your next interview.
See how the conversation shifts.
Why does this matter now, more than ever?
Because in 2025, unclear specs don’t just slow you down.
They make people stop trusting your work.
Conclusion
5W questions cut through the fog.
STAR brings structure to noise.
Prototypes surface what words can’t.
Use them together, use them selectively—but use them.
It’s how you move from “heard” to “understood.”
TDLR:
Don’t let vague interviews wreck your specs.
Ask sharper questions, structure better stories, and sketch ideas on the spot.
It’ll save you hours—and your reputation.
What’s your go-to move when a stakeholder gets vague?
Drop it in the comments.
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