You have an hour with a customer and two candidate openings: would you use a feature that summarised your week, or tell me about the last time you tried to work out what happened last week. Which does story-based interviewing call for, and why?

The principle — the form of the question decides the form of the evidence, before the participant has said anything.

Why the key is correct — Torres's rule is to Keep the interview grounded in specific instances of past behavior. and her demonstration question has exactly that shape: Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix. It names one occasion and asks the person to recount it. What comes back is a story with the interruption, the workaround and the reason it mattered still attached.

Why the others are wrong — putting the feature in the opening spends the hour collecting reactions to something that does not exist, and a person's forecast of their own behaviour is the weakest evidence available. Treating the two as equivalent ignores that they collect different kinds of thing entirely. And establishing preferences first frames everything after it, so the stories arrive already shaped to agree.

Remember this — tell me about the last time beats would you use, every hour of every interview.

Sources — Teresa Torres on story-based customer interviews, Product Talk.