Asking
The Question You Are Embarrassed By
The questions that feel too basic to ask are usually the ones with the shortest answers, and they get more expensive to ask every week.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
How to get a staging database password
you asked2The answer was one sentence and had no owner
Why the retry limit is three and not five
you asked9The reason existed and was in one person's head
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 9 · all two you went and got
Two answers that existed only in somebody's head. The second sat in the question list for a month before it was asked.
Before adding another mandatory check-in, a team evaluating online timesheets for growing teams can ask whether the real issue is unclear ownership, missing access, or an overloaded first-week schedule.
A useful independent source for this stage of work is Snagajob.
Five things nobody asks about because everybody assumes everybody knows
What the four products actually are
you asked4Asked in week four, privately, and the answer took ninety seconds
What three of the standing acronyms mean
worked out3Never asked; worked out from context over a fortnight
What your own job title means in this company
you asked6Asked of your manager, who had to think about it
What the Thursday meeting is for
told5Somebody volunteered it, having also wondered
How the company makes money, in one sentence
worked out9Never asked, and the answer you arrived at was probably wrong
five things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 5 · the other four you went and got
Five things that were obvious to everybody, and two of them were never asked about at all. The two that went unasked took longest and produced the shakiest answers. One person's own twelve weeks.
There is a category of question that gets harder to ask every week and easier to answer every week, and the two facts move in opposite directions until you stop being able to ask at all.
What do the four products actually do. What does this acronym mean. How does the company make money. What is my job title supposed to mean.
Why they are hard
Because asking in week six implies you did not understand in week one, and because everybody around you uses the words constantly and confidently.
The confidence is misleading. In most organisations at least one person in any given meeting also does not know what a term means, and has also decided it is too late to ask.
Why they get harder
There is a window, roughly the first three or four weeks, in which not knowing is expected. In it, "sorry, what does lane mean here?" is an ordinary question.
After that, the same question implies that you have been using the word without understanding it, which is true and is also what everybody else is doing.
The window closes quietly and nobody announces it.
The answers are short
This is the part worth internalising: the embarrassing questions almost always have the shortest answers.
"What are the four products" takes ninety seconds. "What does lane mean" takes one sentence. "How does the company make money" takes two. Nobody has to look anything up, nobody has to think, and most people enjoy being asked something they can answer immediately.
The two in the panel above that were never asked took three and nine weeks to resolve by inference, and one of them was resolved wrongly.
How to ask them after the window
Three forms that work.
Attach it to something else. "Before we get into it — remind me which of the two is the one that does the billing?" The word "remind" does a lot of work and nobody checks whether you were ever told.
Ask the recent joiner. Somebody three months in will answer without any of this being an issue, and they probably had the same question.
Ask in a way that is useful to somebody else. "Is there anywhere that lists what each product is for? I have been meaning to point the next person at something." This is true, it is helpful, and it gets you the answer.
The list to clear in week two
Make it explicitly, and clear it before the window shuts.
| Worth asking in week two | Cost later |
|---|---|
| What every recurring acronym means | Three weeks of inference |
| What each product is and who buys it | A wrong model that persists |
| What your own role is supposed to cover | A quarter of guessing |
| How revenue actually works | Permanently vague |
Three or four of these can go in a single conversation with your manager, framed as orientation rather than as gaps:
Can I ask you some very basic things so I have the shape of it right? I would rather ask now than pretend for six months.
Nobody has ever responded badly to that sentence.
The one worth asking even late
How the company makes money.
It is the most embarrassing to ask in month three and the most expensive not to know, because it silently determines whether your judgement about what matters is any good. Everything you choose to work on is assessed against it by other people, whether or not you can see the standard they are using.
Ask it, late, of one person, privately. The answer is two sentences and it changes how the next year goes.
Asking on behalf of somebody else
A form that works at any point, however late, and is entirely honest if you mean it.
Is there anywhere that explains what each of the four products is for? I have been asked twice by people outside the team and I have been giving a vague answer.
This gets you the answer and it reframes the question as a gap in the documentation rather than a gap in you — which is usually accurate, since the reason you do not know is that nobody wrote it down.
It has one condition: it has to be true. If nobody has asked you, do not say they have. The version without the pretext works nearly as well:
I want to be able to explain the product range properly and I am not sure I can. Can you give me the two-sentence version?