Five questions I ask before taking on any consulting engagement - and what they reveal
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Moe Hachem - July 2, 2026
Not every engagement is the right engagement.
Getting that wrong is expensive for both sides. A client who needed a different kind of help gets the wrong intervention, and I spend months inside work that will not produce the outcome either of us wanted.
The scoping call is where I try to prevent that. I am not trying to perform expertise in the first fifteen minutes. I am trying to understand whether the problem is real, whether it is the kind of problem I can help with, and whether the company is ready to act on what the work reveals.
These are the five questions I come back to.
1. What have you already tried?
This question surfaces whether the company understands its own problem.
A company that has tried several reasonable things and had them not work has already learned something useful. The failed fixes are clues. They often point directly to the structural issue the diagnostic will later confirm.
What I am listening for is specificity. “We improved the handoff documentation and it helped briefly, then the same drift returned” is a useful answer because it points to a maintenance problem, not only a documentation problem. “We tried to improve communication between product and engineering” is too vague. It might be true, but it tells me the company has not yet isolated what it is trying to fix.
2. Who owns product direction right now, and how does that decision reach the team?
This locates the decision architecture, or the absence of one.
If there is a clear answer, I am listening for whether the path from decision to execution is reliable. A strong decision-maker with a weak transmission system produces good intent and inconsistent output.
If there is no clear answer, that is already a finding. Ownership might be shared, contested, informal, or sitting with someone who is not officially responsible for the product. Most execution problems I diagnose have some version of this gap upstream.
I am also listening for whether the person on the call is the actual decision-maker. If I am speaking with a product lead but the authority sits with a founder who is not present, that is not automatically a blocker, but it changes the shape of the engagement.
3. What does a successful engagement look like in three months?
This surfaces expectations, which is where consulting work often fails before it starts.
Some founders want diagnosis: understand what is wrong and get a clear action plan. That is usually a Product Systems Audit.
Some founders want senior judgment over time: critique, product logic, decision support, and sharper tradeoffs. That might be Strategic Advisor.
Some teams need operating involvement closer to the work. That might be Fractional Product & UX Leadership, if the problem requires recurring leadership access rather than only a diagnosis.
The mismatch matters. If someone describes a successful outcome that does not match the problem they described, I need to understand why before I scope anything.
4. Is the team aware we are having this conversation?
An engagement that lands inside a team without context faces a specific kind of friction. The diagnosis can be accurate, and the plan can still fail if the team experiences the work as something being done to them rather than with them.
Sometimes the team will not know yet because leadership needs a private scoping call first. What matters is whether the engagement can start with a clear explanation of purpose before any diagnostic work begins.
I am listening for whether leadership sees the problem as structural or whether they quietly believe the team needs to be fixed. Those are different starting points, and the second one usually needs careful reframing before the work can be useful.
5. What happens if nothing changes?
This determines urgency.
A concrete answer tells me the problem has a real business edge: the company misses a funding milestone, loses an enterprise account, keeps burning sprint capacity, or watches product quality drift while hiring costs rise.
A vague answer can still describe a real problem, but it usually means the cost is not painful enough yet for the company to change how it works. That does not make the company wrong; it means the engagement needs a different pace, or it might not be the right time.
What the answers reveal
Five questions are usually enough to understand whether I can help, what type of engagement makes sense, and whether the company is ready to act on what the diagnosis reveals.
The call exists to match the intervention to the actual problem. A weak fit wastes time, while a strong fit gives the work a real chance to change something.