Discovery Interview Guide — Engineering Management Suite

Goal of each interview: validate or kill the pain and willingness-to-pay hypotheses. You are not selling. You are collecting evidence for the Concept → Validation gate (see ../01_System/ADVISOR_ASSESSMENT.md §6).

Log every interview in INTERVIEW_LOG.md (same folder) within 24 h.

Setup

• 30 minutes, video or phone. Record answers, not quotes you can't use.

• Talk to the person who owns delivery pain: managing director, delivery manager,

or senior/lead engineer. One person per interview.

Script

Warm-up (3 min)

1. "Walk me through how a typical project runs here — from winning it to closing it out."

1. "Where does it hurt most in that cycle?"

Pain validation (10 min) — the numbers that matter

1. "Who drafts your project management plans / proposals / standards, and how long does that take?"

1. "How consistent are your processes between projects? What breaks when a senior person leaves?"

1. "What have you tried to fix this? What did it cost? Why did it stop?"

1. Rank check: "If you had a budget for three improvements this year, is this on the list? Where?"

Past-project leverage (5 min)

1. "If you could press a button and get a first-draft plan/proposal grounded in your last five projects, what would that be worth per month?"

Willingness-to-pay (5 min) — ask, don't push

1. "Firms like yours typically pay $8–15k for a foundation install and $1–2.5k/month ongoing for a managed system. Does that sound plausible, cheap, or out of reach? What would make it worth it?"

1. "Who else would need to agree to spend that?"

Close (5 min)

1. "Is there anyone else you'd suggest I talk to?"

1. If enthusiasm is genuine: "When I run the first pilot cohort, may I come back to you?"

Scoring each interview (fill in the log)

Gate arithmetic: ≥40% pain-validated and ≥3 pay signals across 12–13 interviews → proceed to Validation. Below that → park (the assessment §11).