The one follow-up question that changes every interview

Every interview guide has its standard follow-up: "Can you say more about that?" It's polite. It's neutral. It's also, most of the time, a conversational dead end.

What you usually get back is a rephrased version of the same sentence. "Like I said, it was just kind of frustrating." The person isn't stonewalling — they've already given you their summary, and your prompt asked for another summary. You got what you asked for.

The better version

Try this instead: "Walk me through that."

Same number of words. Completely different request.

"Can you say more" asks for elaboration on an opinion. "Walk me through that" asks for a narrative. It invites chronology. It assumes there's a story — a beginning, a middle, a point where things went sideways — and it politely asks for the story in order.

People can almost always do this. Even when they can't articulate why something was frustrating, they can tell you what happened in what order. The answer arrives with timestamps, other people, specific screens, and the small details that got sanded off the original summary.

Why it works

Memory is organized around episodes, not opinions. When you ask someone how they feel about your product, they reconstruct the feeling from scratch each time, which means you get a slightly different answer every time. When you ask them to walk through a specific episode, they retrieve it — and retrieval is far more reliable than reconstruction.

You also get context for free. The walk-through contains the meeting that happened the day before, the Slack thread that was open in another tab, the teammate who was asking a question over their shoulder. These are the details that turn a complaint into a design problem.

An example

Flat version:

Interviewer: How did the handoff go with design? Participant: Honestly, kind of rough. There was a lot of back-and-forth. Interviewer: Can you say more about that? Participant: Yeah, it just felt like we were going in circles.

You end this exchange with two adjectives ("rough", "circles") and no actionable information.

Walk-me-through version:

Interviewer: How did the handoff go with design? Participant: Honestly, kind of rough. Interviewer: Walk me through it. Participant: So Maya dropped the Figma on Monday. I opened it during standup and realized the empty state was missing. I pinged her, she said it was in another file. I went to that file, the frame was there, but the spec was from an older version. So I made a copy, tried to reconcile it, got lost, and by Wednesday we were on a call redoing half of it.

Same thirty seconds of interview time. Now you have specific moments, specific files, specific decisions — and a testable hypothesis that the handoff process breaks down at the "empty state / edge cases" boundary.

When not to use it

"Walk me through that" is powerful enough that it can wander. If someone is being evasive, or tangenting into unrelated stories, a narrower question is better. "What was the first thing you noticed?" or "What did you do right after that?" keeps the scope tight without demanding a summary.

Save "walk me through that" for the moments when someone has just given you something compressed — a verdict, a feeling, a judgment. That's the signal that there's a longer story underneath, and you want the long version.

The one-liner

If you only remember one thing from this post, let it be this: replace "say more" with "walk me through that", and watch every interview in your next study get twice as useful.

Tape it to your monitor. Your future synthesis self will thank you.