Difficulty: Intermediate
Evidence strength
Relevant metrics: Expert feedback, Ideas generated, Strategy alignment
Validates: Desirability, Viability
How: Set up interviews with internal experts and, if possible, external specialists to grasp the nuances of the problem you're solving. Discuss with stakeholders who can clarify your business strategy, customer perspectives, operational processes, and past attempts at solving similar issues.
Why: No one knows everything. Understanding the big picture requires integrating information from multiple sources. Asking stakeholders for input early can make them feel invested in the outcome.
This product discovery method is part of the Discovery Patterns printed card deck
A collection of clever product discovery methods that help you get to the bottom of customer needs and coining the right problem before building solutions. They are regularly used by product builders at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Amazon.
Get your deck!Expert interviews are a cornerstone method in product discovery when teams need to quickly orient themselves in complex or unfamiliar domains. Whether it’s understanding regulatory constraints, dissecting industry trends, or mapping technical systems, speaking with subject matter experts (SMEs) can dramatically accelerate learning. But the value of expert interviews isn’t automatic. Like any discovery method, their power lies in how well they’re scoped, facilitated, and analyzed.
While customer interviews help you understand problems and contexts from the user’s point of view, expert interviews help you grasp the environment in which those users operate. The best teams use both approaches together. And just like with customers, asking experts good questions—and avoiding leading ones—is essential to getting honest, usable insight.
Why talk to experts?
There are many situations where expert interviews are the right next step. Maybe you’re entering a new vertical, designing for a technical audience, or dealing with constraints outside your domain—like security, compliance, or regulation. Experts can help you build mental models of how things work, how decisions get made, and what real-world constraints your product will have to account for.
These interviews often bring clarity to assumptions hiding in your own plans. They surface edge cases you hadn’t thought of and help validate (or challenge) the feasibility of proposed solutions. In some cases, expert interviews are also useful for identifying the right language and metaphors to use when communicating to end users who share the expert’s context.
How Expert Interviews differ from Customer and Partner Interviews
It’s important to distinguish expert interviews from other interview-based research methods in your discovery toolbox. Customer interviews aim to uncover user behaviors, needs, pain points, and desires in context—they help you understand how your product fits into the lives of those you’re serving. Partner and supplier interviews, on the other hand, focus on operational viability and collaboration potential. They reveal what’s required to deliver your product or service effectively from a logistics, integration, or support perspective.
Expert interviews stand apart in that they focus on domain-specific knowledge, structural forces, and external constraints. You’re not trying to understand personal preferences or emotional needs; you’re looking to gain clarity on systems, regulations, workflows, or patterns that influence your product decisions. Each of these methods serves a distinct purpose, and successful teams know when and how to combine them.
Planning and conducting an effective Expert Interview
Just like with customer interviews, good expert interviews start with a clear learning goal. What do you need to understand better, and why? Are you trying to map a workflow, clarify a system dependency, or explore possible objections to a product idea? Once that’s clear, you can decide what kind of expert to talk to—whether that’s a domain veteran, a system architect, a legal advisor, or someone with adjacent knowledge that helps fill gaps.
Interviews should be semi-structured: use a guide to keep the conversation focused, but leave room to follow promising threads. Experts often reveal valuable insights when reflecting on how a system works, where it breaks down, or how edge cases are handled. As Rob Fitzpatrick outlines in The Mom Test, your goal is not to pitch or validate your idea, but to uncover facts. This means avoiding opinion fishing, future hypotheticals, and vanity questions. Instead, ask about what the expert has actually seen or done. “Tell me about the last time…” is a much better prompt than “Would you use X?”
Experts are usually busy. Respect their time by staying focused and doing your homework. Read enough to ask intelligent, open-ended questions. You don’t need to become an expert yourself, but you do need to show curiosity and basic understanding. Active listening is key—paraphrase what you hear, confirm your understanding, and dig deeper when something isn’t clear.
Interviewing experts well
Interviewing experts effectively means getting past opinions and assumptions and tapping into their real-world experiences. Don’t pitch your idea, don’t fish for compliments, and don’t rely on hypotheticals. Instead, talk about their reality.
Ask about what the reality. “Walk me through the process” is a strong entry point. Avoid asking if they would do something. The more specific the example, the more reliable the insight. When you encounter strong opinions or feature requests, dig deeper. What was their motivation? What failed in the past? What are the real constraints?
You should also be vigilant about the type of data you’re collecting. If the conversation feels full of praise or speculation, you’re probably off course. Instead, steer toward behavior, systems, and patterns. Take good notes, ask who else you should talk to, and don’t be afraid to admit when you’re learning. Being candid often results in better rapport—and better data.
By getting stakeholders to state what they hope to achieve strategically from the initiative, you can produce evidence as to whether their desired outcome aligns with that of the initiative. Getting them to back up their words with actions is even better. Engaging experts early in the process not only fosters a sense of investment among them and helps unveil unique perspectives and tacit knowledge - but also helps in clearly defining strategic goals and expectations.
Making sense of the data
Unlike user interviews, expert interviews often cover broad, systemic topics. This makes the analysis phase especially important. You’re not just looking for problems or needs—you’re looking for patterns, constraints, risks, and principles.
Thematic analysis is a useful approach here. After conducting your interviews, begin by reviewing your notes or transcripts and tagging key points. Group these into themes—categories like “regulatory risk,” “common misconceptions,” or “dependency workflows.” These themes can be turned into diagrams, system maps, or design principles that inform product strategy.
The goal is not to generate personas, but to build structural understanding: what forces shape user behavior, what constraints matter, and what trade-offs experts repeatedly mention. This can be especially useful in highly technical or regulated industries, where missing a key detail could invalidate your whole approach.
A common pitfalls of expert interviews
One of the most common traps in expert interviews is bias—either by over-trusting an expert’s perspective or by steering the conversation toward your own solution. As with any interview, leading questions and vague hypotheticals weaken the insights you gather. You’re not looking for expert validation of your idea; you’re looking for truth, nuance, and blind spots.
Another challenge is misalignment between stakeholders. If you’re bringing insights from expert interviews into a cross-functional team, be sure to synthesize findings clearly and tie them to actionable decisions. Avoid jargon, and highlight where expert perspectives conflict or leave uncertainty.
When Expert Interviews fit in the discovery process
Expert interviews are especially useful early in the discovery process, when you’re framing a problem space or identifying possible risks. They also play a role later, when validating implementation plans, testing assumptions about feasibility, or preparing for regulatory review. They’re not a substitute for end-user research, but they’re a powerful complement.
Teams doing continuous discovery often run a few expert interviews in parallel with user research. This allows them to clarify constraints while also exploring user needs—building a more holistic understanding of the opportunity space. When paired with tools like opportunity solution trees, expert interviews can sharpen the structure and feasibility of your product strategy.
Expert interviews can seem less glamorous than customer conversations, but they’re equally critical to building great products. When used well, they bring clarity to ambiguity, structure to complexity, and depth to your design decisions.
Like all interviews, their value depends on how well you ask questions and how thoughtfully you interpret the answers. Approach them with curiosity, structure, and humility. The experts you talk to won’t design your product—but they’ll help you design it better, faster, and with fewer surprises down the road.
Measuring the Impact of Expert Interviews
The success of expert interviews can be measured by the quality of expert feedback received, the number of new ideas generated, and the extent to which these ideas align with the business strategy.
Expert feedback can be qualitatively assessed based on the depth and usefulness of the insights provided. The number of ideas generated can be quantitatively measured. Strategy alignment, on the other hand, is a more subjective measure and requires a thorough understanding of the business strategy.
Remember, the goal of expert interviews is not just to gather information, but to foster stakeholder investment and generate viable, desirable, and strategically aligned product ideas.
Popular tools
The tools below will help you with the Expert Interview play.
-
Great Question
A research platform that supports scheduling, conducting, and analyzing expert and customer interviews. Offers panel management, video recording, transcription, and thematic tagging to streamline insights.
-
Aurelius
A user research repository tool that helps teams organize, tag, and synthesize insights from interviews—including expert interviews. Ideal for collaborative analysis and theme mapping.
-
Dovetail
Enables secure video transcription, tagging, and thematic analysis of interviews. Widely used to store and organize qualitative research insights from expert, stakeholder, and customer conversations.
-
Condens
A research analysis and repository tool designed for interview synthesis. Supports tagging, segmenting, and visualizing patterns across expert interviews to aid decision-making.
This product discovery method is part of the Discovery Patterns printed card deck
A collection of clever product discovery methods that help you get to the bottom of customer needs and coining the right problem before building solutions. They are regularly used by product builders at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Amazon.
Get your deck!- Sprint book by Jake Knapp & John Zeratsky
- Testing Business Ideas by David J. Bland & Alexander Osterwalder
- In-Depth Interviews for UX Research by Helio Team at Helio
- How to Apply Thematic Analysis to Expert Interviews: Extracting Domain Knowledge by Insight7 Team at Insight7
- How to Get the Most Out of an Interview with a Subject Matter Expert by Megan Kierstead at UX Collective
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick at Foundercentric
