# Socratic Questioning Templates

Use these templates to guide requirements discovery through structured questioning.

## Purpose Discovery

**Goal:** Understand the "why" behind the feature.

- "What problem does this solve for your users?"
- "What happens if we don't build this?"
- "How will success be measured?"
- "Who is the primary user of this feature?"
- "What's the most important outcome?"

## Constraint Identification

**Goal:** Uncover limitations and requirements.

- "Are there performance requirements? (e.g., must load in < 2s)"
- "What's the expected scale? (users, data volume, requests/sec)"
- "Are there compliance requirements? (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2)"
- "What's the timeline/budget constraint?"
- "What existing systems must this integrate with?"

## Trade-Off Exploration

**Goal:** Make implicit preferences explicit.

- "Would you prefer faster development or better performance?"
- "Is flexibility more important than simplicity?"
- "Should this be user-friendly or developer-friendly?"
- "Optimize for: build speed, maintainability, or scalability?"
- "What's more critical: feature completeness or time-to-market?"

## Alternative Exploration

**Goal:** Ensure consideration of all viable approaches.

- "What if we didn't build this at all? What's the workaround?"
- "How would [competitor] solve this?"
- "Could we start with a simpler version? What's the MVP?"
- "What if we had unlimited time/budget? What would we add?"
- "What approaches have you already rejected? Why?"

## Questioning Best Practices

1. **One question at a time** - Don't overwhelm with multiple questions
2. **Wait for answers** - Let conversation flow naturally
3. **Follow threads** - Ask follow-up questions based on answers
4. **Summarize understanding** - "So you need X because of Y?"
