Discovery Interview Guide

Discovery interviews should uncover ownership, risk, constraints, and work already in motion. Keep interviews structured, but leave room for surprises.

Interview groups

Talk to people who see different parts of the system.

• Engineering leadership.
• Product and business owners.
• Service owners and senior engineers.
• SRE, operations, or platform teams.
• Security, compliance, and risk stakeholders.
• Support, customer success, or incident responders.
• Finance or cloud cost owners.

Core questions

Ask these across most interviews:

• What are the most important systems or workflows?
• What breaks most often?
• What is hardest to change safely?
• Where do teams wait on other teams?
• Which manual steps are risky or frequent?
• What production incidents changed behavior?
• What compliance, customer, or audit pressure exists?
• What work is already funded or committed?

Technical questions

For technical owners, cover:

• Source control, branching, and release process.
• Runtime platforms and environment topology.
• Infrastructure ownership and drift management.
• Secrets, identity, and privileged access.
• Observability, SLOs, alerts, and incident flow.
• Data stores, backups, retention, and restore tests.
• Build, test, scan, deploy, and rollback paths.

Interview hygiene

• Separate facts from opinions in notes.
• Capture exact systems, owners, and links where possible.
• Ask for examples of recent incidents or releases.
• Follow surprising claims back to evidence.
• Avoid prescribing solutions during the first interview.

Output

Each interview should produce findings, open questions, risks, and follow-up evidence requests. Do not let interview notes become the final answer without validation from systems and artifacts.