Discovery rarely fits in one person. The consultant builds questions per role and sends a public link; whoever receives it answers without signing up, and the answer enters the engagement identified by the role of whoever spoke.
The problem
Discovery becomes a meeting with seven agendas, or a spreadsheet drifting through email. Half the questions reach the wrong person, answers get lost on the way, and what operations knows never meets what finance approved.
Each role gets the questions only it can answer, in a link that needs no account. The consultant receives the answers identified and crosses them in the conversation, pointing out contradictions between areas instead of silently picking one.
How it works
The consultant decides what to ask each role from what is missing in discovery. The link is public on purpose: asking a CFO to sign up in order to answer three questions is the fastest way to get no answer.
The page says upfront that "I don’t know" is also a useful answer. The goal is what the person knows, with the confidence they actually have, and a declared gap beats an educated guess.
consulting interview
A few questions for the Finance role
Your answers go straight to the project’s data consultant. Answer with what you know: "I don’t know" is also a useful answer.
No account and no password: the link is the authorization, and it stays out of search indexes. Whatever comes back enters the engagement as that role’s answer.
What comes back does not land in an inbox: it enters the project context as that role’s answer, and the consultant records requirements and facts from it.
When two areas contradict each other, the contradiction is raised in the conversation, with both versions on the table. Deciding which one stands is people’s work, and the product does not pretend otherwise.
Now: alternatives compared against weighted criteria, cost computed per tool, assumptions on record.
We want to move everything to a data warehouse. Which one do you recommend?
Before choosing, I need two numbers I do not have yet: your active volume and how many people query per day. You mentioned 40 GB and 25 BI users. At that size, a warehouse usually costs more than it solves.
I will record that as an assumption, with the condition that would invalidate it: if active volume passes 1 TB, the math changes.
Makes sense. Compare the two options then.
Requirements captured
Assumption on record: "active volume stays below 1 TB". Re-checked on every read of the environment.
Under the hood
A link anyone could open demands real care, and it is in the code.
What comes next
Discovery is led by the consultant: one question at a time, disagreement backed by evidence, and every answer recorded as a requirement.
See it from the inside →ContextDocument readingPDF, spreadsheet, Word, CSV and SQL dumps, with the role declared by whoever uploads and a summary of what was understood.
See it from the inside →MemoryMemory and assumptionsFacts, decisions and assumptions outlive the conversation, and each assumption is watched with the condition that would invalidate it.
See it from the inside →Paste the structure, get the most serious findings in about two minutes, and decide later whether an engagement is worth opening. No account, no card.