> If he's got a good sense of humour, maybe try "well, it doesn't herd
> goats" - or something equally as ridiculous, and see if he picks up on
> how broad his question is.

The usual joke is "well it doesn't have an espresso function yet".

> If he doesn't have a good sense of humour, then maybe just ask some
> clarifying questions that point this out in a similar manner, along the
> lines of "well, that's a pretty broad question - did you have something
> more specific in mind?"

The trouble is, the answer will be something of the form of

   "Hey, we should get our product to do XYZ. I saw an Internet video of 
another product that does XYZ, so it shouldn't take long for us to do it."

There are two problems here.

First, you frequently find that what he *thinks* the product in the 
Internet video does isn't what that product *actually* does. Frequently 
he asks us to do XYZ, when that's mathematically impossible.

Second, he has this strange delusion that if any other company, anywhere 
on Earth has done something, it must be trivial for us to do it as well. 
Never mind that some of these products have a team of hundreds of 
developers behind them; the feature *sounds* simple, so it must be easy 
for our team of 4 developers to duplicate that feature. By the end of 
this month, please?

But the main problem, of course, is simply that, like many managers, he 
wants our product to have *every* feature. But, unlike the *good* 
managers out there, he is physiologically incapable of prioritising 
stuff. To him, *everything* has maximum priority - which isn't helpful. 
Also, he becomes obsessed with certain features because they sound cool 
and exciting, rather than because actual customers are willing to pay 
money for it.

Then again, often a customer has no interest in buying our product, so 
they will start playing a game of "Does it do X? Does it do Y? Does it 
do Z? Oh, it can't do Z? Then we won't be buying it." Which our MD takes 
as meaning "if only it could do Z, we could sell MILLIONS!" Erm, no, if 
it could do Z, the customer would simply find some other excuse to not 
buy it. There is a difference between a customer who can't use the 
product without Z, and a customer who just wants an excuse to fob you 
off with.

Then again, I am the world's foremost expert in reading people's 
intentions, so maybe I should just STFU...

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