Asking the right questions
How om collects answers from owners. What it asks, how often, the three ways an owner can answer, and why it asks so few questions.
The scarce resource is not storage or compute. It is the attention of the people who decided. AppThentic is designed to ask them as little as possible, and to make every question worth answering.
Ask less
Before asking anything, AppThentic uses what already exists: PR descriptions, commit messages, tickets, docs and earlier answers. It then ranks the remaining gaps by value: how often the rule changes, how much money or risk it touches, and how many people depend on it. Owners see the highest-value questions first, a few at a time.
Ask better
Questions are specific and anchored in what the system really does.
Why 30 days for consumer orders, rather than 60 as for B2B?
Where does this rule stop applying?
What happened the last time this limit was changed?
A contrastive question (“why 30 rather than 60?”) gets a real reason. A generic one (“please document the refund policy”) gets a paragraph nobody reads.
Follow the answer
Each question depends on the answer before it.
AppThentic: Refunds are allowed only within 30 days. Why 30?
Owner: Company policy.
AppThentic: Which policy sets the 30-day limit?
When an answer is complete, the questions stop.
Three ways to answer
om asked Priya S., Payments lead: “Cash-on-delivery payouts wait 24 hours before release. Why 24 hours, and does it apply to every seller?” She answers however suits her.
| Way | Best for | What om does |
|---|---|---|
| Type a line | One rule. The quickest. | Writes the reason up as one note |
| Send a voice note | Talking it through between meetings | Transcribes it and writes the reason up as one note |
| Walk om through it | A whole flow | Joins a call while the owner shares their screen, highlights the lines being explained, and writes one note per rule |
In a six-minute walkthrough of payouts/settle.ts, Priya explains three rules and om saves three notes:
- COD payouts wait 24 hours after delivery. Reason: fraud is flagged within a day (INC-118).
- Payouts above ₹50,000 go to manual review. Owner: Head of Risk.
- Gateway timeouts retry once. Two retries caused double payouts in 2025.
In every way, om writes it up and the owner approves it before anyone sees it. The note keeps its source: the typed line, the voice note or the call. Nothing is Approved until the owner says so.
om suggests a walkthrough when written answers keep raising new questions, or when the owner asks for one.
A shared screen can show customer data. Recordings, voice notes and transcripts follow the same access rules and retention as everything else in Organization Memory. See Data handling.
What AppThentic does not do
- It does not send long questionnaires.
- It does not offer a menu of reasons to pick from. A busy person picks one anyway, and an invented reason gets recorded as approved.
- It does not reward volume with points or badges.
“I don’t know” and “still checking” are answers
Owners can say they need to check. The rule stays Unknown until they answer, and is never guessed into Approved.
If the owner doesn’t know, that is recorded too, and AppThentic looks for someone who does. See Finding the owner.