Ask for the decisions only you can make
Some decisions belong to the person shaping the product: its name, its intended identity or a constraint the project has not recorded. A creation method can declare those questions and use the answers in its brief.
The questions travel with the method. Wildo checks that the answers match what was asked, so a missing answer or an unsupported choice cannot quietly become an agreed product decision.
Not every creator wants to answer everything, and “I don’t know” is an honest answer. Each question says whether a quick interview asks it, and whether an answer may be proposed when the creator does not know. A quick interview asks the essentials and proposes the rest from those answers. The creator reviews the proposals when they are there; when creation runs on its own, the proposals are recorded straight away. Either way each is recorded as an assumption, marked as such and listed to revisit, never as their decision. Questions about regulated data or a regulated sector are always named before a proposal is kept, and are never assumed while nobody is there, and a question only the creator can answer, such as what kind of application this is, is never proposed.
Example — Give a brand its intended character
Before preparing the brand brief, the method asks the creator to choose the name from candidates the companion proposed and screened against the trademark registers, and to pick the kind of mark. It does not ask for symbolism, mood or colour: those are derived from the product vision and the market’s voice, and one free-text question lets the creator steer them.
For engineers
Declare questions with stable references
This excerpt comes from the brand method’s declared interview. It shows a choice whose options are computed from what the application has already decided, a free-text answer, and a choice whose values are explicit:
{
"questions": [
{
"ref": "brand-name",
"question": "Which screened name should the brand carry?",
"kind": "choice",
"optionsFrom": "brand_name_screening_candidates"
},
{
"ref": "brand-tagline",
"question": "Is there a tagline? Answer none if not.",
"kind": "free_text"
},
{
"ref": "logo-mark-type",
"question": "Which logo archetype fits the brand?",
"kind": "choice",
"options": ["combination_mark", "wordmark", "lettermark", "pictorial_mark", "abstract_mark", "emblem", "mascot"]
}
]
}
Question wording is shortened here for readability; the actual method declares the full interview in method.elicitation. A host must submit answers for the complete declared question set, using questionRef and answer, not only this excerpt.
Validate the answer before composing the brief
composeElicitationSection matches each answer to its question, rejects duplicate or unknown references, trims text and refuses empty answers. It then requires every declared question to have an answer.
| Question kind | Answer contract |
|---|---|
| Free text | Nonempty authored text |
| Choice | One of the declared option values, or, for a choice whose options are computed (optionsFrom), one of the options computed from what the application has landed, checked against the same list the creator was shown |
| Confirm | An unambiguous yes or no, normalized to the canonical answer |
Nuance belongs in an accompanying free-text answer. An ambiguous confirmation is refused rather than interpreted as consent or a product fact.
Carry the answer into the work
The companion composes the validated interview into the method brief. Composite work passes the parent’s rendered answers into its child context, so related methods can reason from the same supplied decisions.
Declare a question when the answer genuinely requires the creator. Existing specifications and gathered evidence should supply facts already available to the method. Compliance posture, for example, derives from evidence and adequacy work rather than a fixed questionnaire asking the creator to reconstruct obligations.
An upfront interview establishes known inputs. The clarification channel handles a consequential question discovered during generation preparation.