I got asked recently on a holiday by a friend “What do you do?”.
Good question!
Many projects I work on in the life sciences include a series of “expert interviews“ that contribute to a client’s strategy development, inform them about the external environment, or support decision-making regarding new tools.
Expert interviews could be useful if your business is moving a product towards a major decision point, or you’re an early-stage company that has yet to conduct thorough external research on your product.
In this blog post, I’ll explain why, when, and how to conduct expert interviews, who you should speak to, and where you should conduct them.
Why would you want to do expert interviews?
We live in a world with much uncertainty, and over the last four years, you haven’t been able to escape the phrase “unprecedented times.” Whether you’re leading a company, team, or product you are expected to make important decisions with a “clouded” view of the external market.
Of course, you can do desk research, looking at medical papers, articles from news outlets, and investor reports, but this can take a lot of time and requires expertise to do a thorough job.
By speaking to a group of experts, you can gain a deeper understanding of the world surrounding your business area in a relatively limited amount of time to help shape your decisions.
They are also great opportunities to test ideas and hypotheses, as well as brainstorm solutions.
Some examples that I have worked on this year that have fed into commercial decisions include testing a concept for a new digital tool with budget holders to see if they would purchase it, understanding how surgical teams buy bundles of equipment to better price products versus competitors, and identifying new med tech software to support a companies traditional portfolio.
When should you do it?
Before you make a decision.
Sounds obvious, right?
However, I have been part of multiple projects where a client has already made a decision. Then, they decide to do expert interviews for diligence and don’t enjoy it when the findings suggest their decision was wrong.
One example was for a pharmaceutical company that required clinical design advice for reformulating one of their drugs that would go off patent in 3–4 years. The experts I spoke to were all excited about new, powerful drugs that would be launched imminently. These launches would make the original (and future reformulation) near-obsolete, with the experts of the opinion that reformulating was a complete waste of time, as you could expect, not what a client would want to hear!
Even if you have conducted a set of interviews before a decision, it can be useful to refresh those findings regularly as part of a post-implementation review or over the course of a longer project to see if sentiment has changed, either talking to the same experts or a mixture of the same and new.
How should you do it?
This depends slightly on the topic, but there are general rules of thumb for where I have seen success.
First, a preformulated list of questions you’d like to ask is key. This can be created iteratively, starting with your immediate team, shared with colleagues in collaborating functions, or with anyone within your organization who can add value.
I’m biased here, but at this stage, bringing an external moderator in to review the questions and conduct the interview adds value by removing biases and internal agendas. The expertise built from regularly conducting these projects helps in knowing the types of responses you may get to certain question types, which questions are challenging to ask and may need rewriting or asked through proxies, and how you can get answers to questions you haven’t even thought of asking.
The questions should be ordered into a discussion guide for the interviews. The discussion guide is very much a guide. Depending on the topics of interest, the particular expert’s knowledge (and interests), and answers that come up, the moderator should be flexible and able to ask follow-up questions off-script and push into new directions that weren’t initially considered by the team.
In structuring the questions in the guide, I find starting broadly, going a level or two in scope above your team’s initial questions, is a great way to open.
Let’s say you want to understand the market in which you are launching a new cancer drug. Before discussing the specific disease or patients suffering from it, a question like “What are the biggest challenges you face today?” is a great way to warm the expert up and gather big-picture ideas.
The core questions and sub-questions form the majority of the guide. As you work through a series of interviews, you can iteratively update the guide with any follow-up questions the moderator thinks of during interviews or incorporate additional ideas from previous experts.
To wrap up the interview, it’s good to look to the medium-term future, construct a scenario, and ask the experts what they think might happen. Designing and asking this question to get useful information takes practice but can lead to useful ideas. For example, you could ask if several new drugs that are currently in Phase 3 have launched, and generics of first-generation drugs are available in 5 years time, how will physicians adjust the treatment algorithm and which geographies may be more likely to use generics vs. innovative drugs due to pricing.
The final question I ask is: “Based on this discussion today, is there anything we haven’t asked, or would it be useful to add based on the questions?”. It is difficult to count the number of times we’re in the final few minutes of an interview, and this question leads to juicy findings that we hadn’t picked up!
Who should you ask?
Choosing the right mix and number of experts to speak to is another part that needs some thought.
Your end user is a good place to start: If you are designing a product for hospital IT staff, speaking to them and those who are making the decision to buy it would be a good choice.
Then, you have proxies who may not use your product or occupy the job title of interest but can provide additive thoughts. In this instance, the cybersecurity team or physicians interacting with the IT staff could also be useful.
Then you have academics whose research covers the area of interest who are deeply knowledgeable, enjoy educating others, and are great for brainstorming. Also, speaking to specialist consultants who work in the area provides the benefit of understanding multiple customers, competitors, or vendors (e.g., medical device consultants who design products for multiple companies).
When it comes to deciding how many experts to speak to, a few interviews can be valuable, especially if the honoraria budget is tight. However, as more topics are included, or if you want to speak to people from multiple functions, you will need to speak to more people.
For me, a bare minimum is three people who can answer a specific question in detail. If you want to speak to people from a specific role, 4–5 can be enough if it gives a good representation of the role (e.g., CEOs of large hospitals)
Theoretically, you can speak to as many experts as you want, but then reach a tradeoff in budget vs. finding new information. Conversations start to become repetitive, and unless you have a specific reason to get 15-20 qualitative confirmations of a certain question or point, you move into the territory of a survey being more time—and cost-efficient.
If you’re a larger corporation, it can also pay to speak to people within your company. Companies are notorious for having poorly codified or shared knowledge. Sometimes by asking around you can find people in other departments who worked for competitors, customers or suppliers, who can provide useful data during a structured interview with an external moderator.
Where can you find the experts?
There are multiple options for finding experts to speak to, from “custom recruiting” people yourself (on LinkedIn, trade websites, or university directories), using a consultant to run the project and do the recruiting, or using an expert network (GLG, AlphaSights, Atheneum, etc.).
When conducting market research in-house, compliance issues, such as the inability to communicate with competitors, must be considered. Respondents may also answer questions to please the researcher, compromising the accuracy of the research. Though cheaper, this approach often yields low research value.
Most consultancies and market researchers conduct expert interviews as part of a project (whether a larger strategy project or a specific targeted research project). They can speak to people independently without revealing their organization or interests. You can identify those who are specialists in the industry or product of interest or opt for generalists who may bring an external perspective and analogies from other markets when they interpret the findings.
Using an expert network, you will likely be able to conduct the interviews double-blinded, with the network’s internal team handling recruitment, scheduling, and other admin. Many of these networks also offer independent moderators the option to take the calls and deliver the findings in a PowerPoint or other formats.
Wrap Up
Hopefully, this was a useful introductory explanation of expert. In a future post, I’ll go into more detail on how you can use your findings.
If this has triggered your interest in the topic further, or you think you may benefit from expertise in conducting these interviews for your business, get in touch at sv@sivan-consulting.com or on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-vanstone-620b1446/