Recently, when speaking with prospective clients, instead of focusing on the features they want, I like to ask questions like:
What's wrong with what you have now?
Why not fix what you have instead of rebuilding?
What problem are you trying to solve?
Why write software for this at all?
Why not do it manually?
Why do you need to do this now?
What results would you expect to see after this project?
If they can answer these types of questions and explain the business outcomes they're looking to achieve and what value I can add, those are the projects I want to work on.
