Hey

You ever get one of those drive-by requests?

“Can you build me a dashboard that shows X?”

No context. No goal. Just... X. Whatever that is.

Here’s the real problem. It’s not that the request is bad.

It’s that it’s probably disconnected from what they actually care about.

A stakeholder will ask for a metric or a chart or a sync job, but what they’re really trying to do is reduce churn, or hit their OKR, or cover their ass in a meeting they forgot about.

If you treat the request as the work, you end up building something that technically works — but still misses the point.

And you get frustrated when they ghost you. Or change the scope. Or say “this isn’t quite what I needed” after 3 weeks of effort.

I’ve been there. Way too many times.

The fix?

Start every request with this question:

What does success actually look like for you?

Then follow it with a few more. I use a set of 5 questions that cut through the noise and help me get the real ask.

Not the spreadsheet ask. The business ask.

Because when you understand what they really want, you can either:

• build the right thing
• steer them to a better option
• or say no without it turning into a fight

Tomorrow I’ll share how to do that last one — how to say “no” or “not yet” without losing trust.

But today, if you want to see the 5 clarifying questions I use on nearly every intake conversation...

👉 Join the early access list for the Data Leader’s Influence System

Inside the course, I walk through how each question works, when to ask it, and how to avoid the usual "project spinout" mess that happens when you skip them.

More tomorrow,

Yordan