Expert Interview Prep

Expert Interview Prep Skill

An hour with a real expert is expensive and perishable — and most of it gets spent badly: fifteen minutes of questions the expert's own writing already answers, a list marched through on schedule while the expert's best tangent dies unfollowed, and notes that resolve to "great conversation." The prep flips the economics: homework raises the starting altitude (the call begins where public knowledge ends), the question arc is designed (calibration → the core unknowns → the frontier questions only this person can answer), and the discipline in the room is follow-up over coverage — the fifth "why" beats the ninth topic.

What This Skill Produces

• The homework brief — what the expert has already said publicly (writing, talks, the searchable record), so no question re-asks it
• The question arc — calibration openers → the core unknowns (ranked, since time will run out) → the only-this-person frontier questions
• The follow-up toolkit — the probes that go deep: "what's an example?", "who disagrees with that and why?", "what would change your mind?"
• The capture plan — recording/notes division, the same-day synthesis, and the repo deposit (research-repo-setup)

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• The expert and the occasion — who, their actual expertise edges (experts are spiky — the prep aims at their peaks), and the relationship (a paid analyst call, a courtesy favor, a potential advisor — the register differs)
• The decision the call feeds — what the team will do differently after; questions trace to it or get cut (desk-research-sprint decomposition applies)
• The current belief state — what the team thinks it knows, including the shaky parts; the best expert questions test beliefs, and hidden beliefs can't be tested
• The time box — 30 vs. 60 minutes changes the arc's ambition; both change what gets pre-sent

Framework: The Prep Rules

1. Homework to the public frontier: read what they've written, watch the talk, know their stated positions — then open questions with "you've written that X — …" which simultaneously (a) skips the retread, (b) signals seriousness (experts calibrate their effort to the asker's), and (c) earns the right to push on the position. Asking a googleable question tells the expert which hour this will be.
2. The arc: calibrate, core, frontier: two calibration questions (their current view, what's changed lately — cheap, warms the channel, catches stale homework) → the ranked core unknowns (the decision-critical questions, best first — time will run out) → the frontier ("what's nobody asking about this?", "where is the conventional wisdom wrong?") — the questions with no other source.
3. Follow-up beats coverage: the standing rule — when an answer surprises, stay ("say more," "what's a concrete case?", "who disagrees?") — a list fully covered at survey depth loses to three questions at mechanism depth. The list is a map, not a contract; ranked order means the sacrificed questions are the right ones.
4. Test beliefs explicitly: at least one question stakes the team's current belief for demolition — "we're operating on the assumption that X; where is that wrong?" Experts correct stated beliefs far more usefully than they answer open questions; the correction is often the call's whole ROI.
5. Capture with epistemics, same day: note claims vs. opinions vs. hearsay as the expert frames them ("everyone's seeing" ≠ "my data shows"), synthesize same-day while tone and emphasis survive, deposit to the repo with the expert-single-source confidence grade — one expert is one (excellent) source, and the source-triangulation rules apply to their numbers too.