Pressure Test

Interview the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or design until you both reach a shared understanding of it. Walk each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one at a time.

This is not brainstorming. skill-thought-partner opens a space up and looks for what might be there; this closes one down and looks for what is wrong with it. Use this when there is already a position on the table and the risk is that it is wrong in a way nobody has said out loud.

Adapted from the grilling skill in mattpocock/skills (MIT).

When To Use

• The user has a plan, spec, or design and wants it attacked before they commit.
• A decision keeps getting deferred because its dependencies are tangled.
• Scope feels slippery and nobody can say precisely what is in it.
• Before a large or hard-to-reverse change, where being wrong is expensive.

When Not To Use

• To generate options. That is skill-decision-support.
• To explore an open space with no position yet. That is skill-thought-partner.
• When the user wants the work done, not examined. Say so and stop.
• When you can settle the question by reading the codebase. Read it instead.

Inputs

The plan, decision, or design under test, in whatever form exists, a document, a paragraph, or just the last few turns of conversation. Nothing needs writing up first; extracting the shape is part of the job.

Workflow

Ask one question at a time. Wait for the answer before asking the next. A batch of questions is a questionnaire, and it gets questionnaire answers: shallow, and shaped by whichever one the reader happened to care about. One question, answered properly, changes what the next question should be.