Types of Interviews
There are three kinds of stakeholder interview, separated by whether your innovation is in the room. Discovery comes first and stays primary; feedback tests reactions to a solution; advisory seeks expert guidance. Most of the 12 rules apply to all three.
Three types of interview
Every stakeholder conversation is one of three kinds, and the dividing question is one: is your innovation in the room?
You are there to learn. The solution is not present and is not described. You explore the person's needs, workflow, and experience without steering them toward anything you are building. Discovery can be broad or narrow. Because nothing has been suggested, it produces the cleanest evidence, so it comes first and stays primary.
You test how stakeholders react to something specific you put in front of them: a concept, prototype, plan, or direction. Because the idea is in the room, the answers are shaped by it, so this evidence is discounted for bias. Rule 8, no ice-cream questions, earns its keep here.
You seek an expert's guidance on how to proceed given your specific solution, for example a regulatory or reimbursement expert mapping your pathway, or a key opinion leader on direction. Disclosing the solution is necessary, not contaminating. The answer is reliable to the limit of the expert's knowledge, weighted by their role rather than discounted for framing.
Most teams' instinct is to jump straight to feedback or advisory, to show the idea and hear that people like it or that an expert blesses it. Resist it. Discovery comes first and stays primary. Feedback and advisory tell you whether a specific solution fits and how to proceed, but only after discovery has told you whether you are solving the right problem.
All three apply across stakeholders
The types are not tied to particular people. The type follows your purpose, not the person's title. You can run discovery or feedback with any stakeholder, the clinician who uses the device, the administrator who pays for it, the patient. Advisory is when you seek guidance from someone with relevant expertise, a regulator or payer, a methodologist, or a key opinion leader. The same key opinion leader is a discovery interview when you are learning from them, a feedback interview when you are testing their reaction, and an advisory interview when you are asking how to proceed.
Who is speaking: the person or the institution?
One distinction cuts across all three types: is the person answering for themselves or for an institution? The same individual does both, often in the same conversation, and the two carry very different weight.
Speaking as myself
First-hand evidence: their own experience, behavior, and views. The strongest kind in discovery. Rely on it.
Speaking for my institution
A claim about what the organization does, requires, or will decide. Only as good as their role in it. Verify the role or corroborate before you trust it.
What "the hospital" will buy is authoritative from the executive who signs the order and speculative from the surgeon who hopes it will happen.
- A surgeon says the current instrument frustrates them during a specific step. Personal, behavioral, first-hand. Strong.
- The same surgeon says "our value-analysis committee would approve this within a month." Unless they sit on that committee, that is a guess about an institution. Treat it as a lead to verify, not a finding.
- A nurse says "I would never trust that reading." Personal. A nurse says "our unit protocol requires a confirmatory test." Institutional, and checkable.
- A department head is enthusiastic about your device. That is their personal view. Whether the institution buys it is a separate question for the economic buyer. Mistaking individual enthusiasm for institutional commitment is the most common and most expensive misread in healthcare innovation.
How the 12 rules apply
The twelve rules govern interview quality, and most bind all three types without exception. The only difference: in feedback and advisory interviews Rules 1 (no solution framing) and 2 (no seeding) do not apply, because the solution and the topic are in the room by design. Every other rule binds, and Rule 8 (no ice-cream questions) matters most in feedback, since that is where reactions inflate. See The 12 Rules for the full rule-by-rule guide.
Suspending Rules 1 and 2 is why feedback is discounted relative to discovery. Advisory is the exception among the in-room types: disclosing the solution is required to get a correct answer, so it is weighted by the expert's knowledge and authority, not discounted for framing.