What is an Eigenquestion?
I learned about eigenquestions from this post by Coda.1
As a math nerd2, the concept immediately resonated with me.
Don’t worry! No math is required. In fact, the basic idea is simple. To quote the post:
The eigenquestion is the question where, if answered, it likely answers the subsequent questions as well.
Said another way - find the question that answers the most downstream questions, makes subsequent questions irrelevant, or constrains the answers for questions that remain.
A concrete example
Imagine you are starting a business. Congrats!
A key question every entrepreneur faces is “who are my customers?”
To start with a common framing - are you B2B? B2C? B2B2C?
You may not have thought about it before, but your answer to that seemingly simple question answers a lot more questions (even some you may not have thought of yet).
Choosing B2B requires a totally different approach to sales than B2C. It also affects how you market, product decisions, pricing & packaging, etc… Questions that otherwise had a ton of possible answers, like “how should our data hierarchy be modeled?”, already have some, if not most, of the potential options eliminated. Why? Because some answers don’t make sense in B2B.
To be clear, finding the eigenquestion can be difficult. It’s a process that takes a lot of thought and a number of iterations, but it’s well worth your time. The exercise of trying to find the question is often more valuable than the question, itself.
Footnotes
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I highly encourage you to read both the Art of Framing Problems and Eigenquestion posts in their entirety ↩
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And someone who has done a fair share of dimensionality reduction ↩