Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)
Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Shishir Mehrotra's decision-making technique, tested via his teleportation-device interview question: instead of asking many small questions, find the one or two 'eigenquestions' whose answers structure the whole problem into quadrants you can act on. It's a skill in simplification that children are naturally good at and adults train out of themselves.
Origin
From Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Coda and former VP of Product & Engineering at YouTube.
Core principles
- 01An eigenquestion is the question that most drives the answer to a decision.
- 02Constraining yourself to few questions forces you to find the ones that actually matter.
- 03Every question you ask should map to a decision it lets you make.
- 04Simplification is a skill; children do it naturally and it can be relearned in low-stakes settings.
How to run it
- 1
Frame the decision, then cap your questions
Take the problem (e.g. bring a teleportation device to market) and restrict yourself to only one or two questions before you must produce a plan.
Pro tip Use a made-up, low-stakes scenario to learn the method — people learn it far better when stakes are low.
Watch out Asking many descriptive questions (how big, how fast, how many bits) usually signals you haven't found the eigenquestion.
- 2
Identify the questions that drive the answer
Find the one or two questions whose answers most change what you'd do — e.g. 'Is it safe enough for humans?' and 'Is it more expensive to buy them or to run them?'
Pro tip For every candidate question ask 'what decision does knowing this let me make?' If none, drop it.
- 3
Build the quadrants and derive the plan
Cross the two answers into quadrants and read off the strategy for each cell (cheap-to-buy-expensive-to-run → deploy everywhere like fax machines; expensive-to-buy → place strategically like airports; unsafe for humans → high-value goods transport).
Pro tip Eigenquestions are everywhere — practice by asking 'what's the eigenquestion?' of everyday things like why three gas stations sit on one corner.
In the wild
A candidate limited to two questions asked whether the device is safe enough for humans and whether it's cheaper to buy or to run, then mapped answers into quadrants that each implied a distinct go-to-market plan.
→ With just two questions the candidate produced a full strategic plan, demonstrating the ability to find the questions that drive the answer.
Common mistakes
Asking descriptive questions with no decision attached
Asking things like 'what size is it?' fails when you can't name the decision that answer enables — it signals you haven't located the question that actually drives the outcome.
Over-complicating instead of simplifying
Adults strip out the simplification skill kids use naturally; piling on detail questions obscures the one or two that matter and prevents a crisp plan.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders and interviewers who need to cut through complex, ambiguous decisions quickly.
Not ideal for
Problems where the key variables are genuinely unknown and require broad discovery before any question can dominate.
From the transcript
“they very quickly find what are the two one or two eigen questions on this topic”
“just with those two questions I can perform these quadrants”
“what is the question that really drives drives this answer”
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