What a fifteen-minute interview actually asks

Ask someone what repetitive tasks they do and you will get "umm, emails". That is not evasion. People do not experience their work as a set of processes. They experience it as their job, one continuous thing, and the parts most worth automating are exactly the parts that have gone invisible through repetition. A form cannot get underneath that. It asks for a summary, and a summary is where the detail goes to die.

So the interview does not ask about your job. It asks about yesterday.

Walk me through yesterday

The opening question is always the same: walk me through yesterday, starting with the very first thing you worked on. It works because it asks for behaviour rather than for a description. Nobody has to categorise anything or decide what counts as a process. They replay a day, and the routine work comes out on its own, in the order it happened, with the interruptions still attached to it.

From there the interviewer follows what it heard. If somebody mentions a pricing quote, the next question is what has to happen before a quote gets written, not a jump to the next item on a list. That is the difference between an adaptive interview and a questionnaire: the second question depends on the first answer.

What gets written down

For every process that surfaces, the interview keeps pulling until it has:

• The trigger. What actually starts this. Not "when needed" but the specific event: an email arrives, a customer asks on a call, the month ends.
• The steps. In order, in the employee's own words.
• The tools. Only the ones named out loud. If somebody says "I put it in the system", the interviewer asks which system. It never guesses, because a tool nobody confirmed is a tool the automation plan cannot rely on.
• Frequency and minutes per instance. Two small numbers that turn a story into hours per month.
• Handoffs, with the waiting time. Who it goes to next, and how long it usually sits before they pick it up.
• What breaks. The version of the process where something goes wrong, which is usually where the real cost is.

That last one earns its place more often than people expect. A process that takes twenty minutes when it goes well can take two hours when a field is missing, and the twenty-minute version is the one people describe unprompted.

Two or three processes, not a census

The interview goes deep on two or three processes rather than skimming everything. A shallow list of fifteen tasks cannot be priced or automated. Three processes with triggers, tools, frequencies and handoffs can be. With the whole team interviewed, the coverage comes from the number of people, not from making each conversation broader.

The question that comes last

Every interview closes by asking how many hours a week go to ad-hoc interruptions: the requests, the chasing, the things that never became a process because they never repeat quite the same way.

It comes last on purpose. Asked at the start it gets a shrug. Asked after somebody has spent fifteen minutes reconstructing an actual day, it gets a real number, because they have just been reminded what the day looked like.

That number is then treated differently from everything else in the report, for reasons set out in the guide on pricing the hours.

What the employee gets out of it

The framing is not a neutral detail. Employees are told the point is to find the boring parts of their job and remove them, because that is what an automation audit does when it is done properly. Nobody is asked to justify their time. Nothing anyone says reaches their manager: transcripts stay with the consultant and never appear in the owner's report.

It takes about fifteen minutes, on their own phone, whenever suits them. Most people do it once and are surprised by how much of their week they had stopped noticing.