Expert interview questions for an unfamiliar industry

The best expert interview questions for an unfamiliar industry are about one real transaction, not the whole industry. Ask who starts it, who does the work, who decides and what happens when it goes wrong. Each new term then has a place in a process, and the next question gets easier to pick.

Skip "Tell me everything about the industry." You get an interesting overview, with no way to tell firsthand experience from opinion, or which part matters to you.

1. Sketch a rough map before the call

Draw a line from customer need to completed outcome. Add only the actors public sources name, with question marks where links are unclear.

Here is a made-up example that runs through this post. A founder researching replacement parts sketches: equipment owner, then service contractor, then distributor, then parts supplier. That is a guess about one segment. Part of the call's job is to check whether those labels fit at all.

The SBA's market research guidance covers alternatives, customer location, competition and pricing. Use it to organize your public homework, and keep data definitions and market boundaries visible. Read the SBA's market research guidance.

Don't fill the market-size box with an expert's offhand estimate. Record it as an estimate with its definition and basis, and decide what public dataset could check it.

2. Use a question map, and skip the rows that don't fit

This is an original guide. Pick the rows that match the person's experience; no single interview needs all of them.

Area	Starter question	What to capture
Trigger	What starts a real request for this product or service?	Event, urgency, and initiating role
Work	What happens from that request to a completed outcome?	Steps, actors, artifacts, and handoffs
Money	Who pays whom, and what is the payment for?	Commercial relationships without private deal details
Decision	Who can choose, approve, delay, or reject the next step?	Authority and criteria
Constraint	Where can the process stop even when everyone wants it to proceed?	Capacity, compatibility, information, or other requirements
Exception	Describe a case that did not follow the usual route	A boundary to the initial explanation

Ask for answers from work they did or watched. When they describe another part of the chain, ask the source: direct involvement, colleagues, public information or inference.

3. Follow one case until the vocabulary shows up

In the parts example, the founder asks a distributor operator to walk through a permitted, anonymized order from request to delivery. The operator mentions a "substitution approval." The founder asks what the term meant in that order, instead of nodding along.

Good follow-ups: "Who proposed the substitute?" "What had to match?" "Who accepted it?" "What happened if nobody could confirm?" Those questions turn a term into a decision with people and consequences.

Keep a glossary with three columns: term, meaning in this case, and possible variation. A manufacturer, a distributor and an end user may use the same word differently, so the first definition you hear is not the industry's definition.

Ask for an example when you don't know an abbreviation. Clarify terms that change your picture of the process; there is no prize for collecting every acronym.

4. Ask about incentives through choices people made

"Who benefits?" is a fine start, but follow it with a real choice. In the parts example: "When the original item was unavailable, what options did the distributor consider, and what made one preferable?"

Listen for differences between the person placing the request, the party paying and the party absorbing the delay. That may reveal a tension worth researching, but don't assign a motive from a role label.

For each choice, note five things:

the actor
the choice
the stated reason
the consequence
an alternative explanation

The last one keeps your first reading open to challenge. A supplier that declines an urgent request might have hit a capacity limit rather than lost interest in the customer.

Ask about doing nothing, too. Work may be postponed, handled internally or solved with a substitute from another category, which marks the real edge of the decision.

5. Ask for the exception that breaks the map

After walking through an ordinary case, ask: "What kind of case would make this sequence wrong?" An expert might describe emergency orders, cross-border work, highly customized items or a different customer type. Treat the answer as a lead to check, not proof that the exception is common.

Write the condition onto the map, for example: "Substitution path applies only when the customer accepts the compatibility check." That beats an unconditional arrow between two companies.

Ask about time as well: "During what period did you work with this process?" "Which parts may have changed since then?" If the answer concerns current rules or standards, verify it with the responsible primary source.

6. Let the remaining gap pick your next interview

NSF's I-Corps description includes customer discovery conversations with customers, partners and other stakeholders. An industry map works the same way: each unanswered connection points to the participant best placed to explain it. Read NSF's description.

The distributor operator can explain order handling but may not see why an equipment owner approved a substitute. That calls for a customer-side interview, not necessarily a more senior distributor executive.

End the call by reading the map back and asking where it is incomplete. Afterward, tag each important connection with its source, context, period and whether it is firsthand, and mark disputed ones.

You leave with a rough process map, a glossary tied to examples and questions for the next person. That makes the next call sharper. It does not describe a whole industry, so don't present it as one.