Use reMarkable 2 for Better Expert Interviews

As a consultant, leveraging expert networks for rapid insights in new contexts is essential – leveraging the reMarkable 2 paper tablet can make the work easier and faster.

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Why am I qualified to write this guide on the reMarkable and expert interviews?

As a former management consultant and current executive, I’ve been on all sides of expert interviews.  I have also been experimenting with the reMarkable 2 for the past three years in my quest to maximize my personal effectiveness while also staying balanced and healthy.  Recently, I have been using my reMarkable 2 as part of my expert interview workflow. 

What are expert interviews?

In the business world, expert interviews are private conversations with industry experts to gain knowledge of market conditions or best practices.  These conversations are generally conducted telephonically and come in two major flavors:

1. Professionally recruited experts – Sourcing services (more below) recruit experts to provide input on a specific market or problem set
2. Experts from personal network – Contacts from a person’s or firm’s wider network who can provide input on a subject. 

This article will focus on professionally recruited experts because this type of interview is extremely common in the business world today and the time bound nature of the interview requires prep to maximize the value.  Recruited expert interviews are often hour-long sessions that can cost the client $500+ per hour.

Who uses expert interviews?

Expert interviews are extremely useful for any team or firm that is trying to get up to speed quickly on a specific industry or niche.  This can include:

• Management consultants (e.g., McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, Deloitte) seeking to build client recommendations
• Private equity firms (e.g.,Blackstone, Apollo, Platinum Equity) learning about a new industry or validating a potential investment
• Investment banks (e.g., Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Evercore Group) validating an investment hypothesis or refining their perspective for advisory work

What services provide expert knowledge services?

There are a number of professional sourcing firms that specialize in expert interviews (also known as expert networks).  These include:

• Legacy services: GLG, AlphaSites, Kelton, Dialectica
• Newer entrants: Maven, Tegus, Inex One, DeepBench

Who participates in expert networks?

So called ‘experts’ that are sourced by professional expert networks are generally executives (or retired executives) with depth in a particular niche.  I’ve experienced everything from execs with decades in a relevant fortune 500 to people with only tangential experience in a subject.  Generally the more specific and novel the ask is from a client, the harder it will be to source specific experts. 

What are best practices for maximizing the value of an expert interview?

Expert interviews are expensive and often conducted in a time constrained environment.  Therefore, maximizing the interview is essential to success.  Like most things, having a plan and implanting it efficiently are critical to expert interviews. 

Before the interview session

In the Army, we used the 5 P’s – “Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” And that phase very much holds for expert network interviews.  Preparation is critical to maximizing the opportunity to interview a former executive about a critical subject.  Important preparation includes:

• Conduct background research to initially inform the team
• Well articulate the requirement to the expert network provider
• Screen candidates for the right perspectives
• Schedule enough experts to provide a holistic view
• Develop (and publish internally) an interview guide

During the interview session

Once the interview starts, the clock (and quite literally the meter) are running.  These sessions can either fly by (generally with a great expert) or absolutely drag on (with an ineffective communicator or an irrelevant expert).  To maximize the session:

• Screen for compliance upfront
• Structure the limited time
• Use your interview guide
• Take good notes – critical call out here, it’s ideal that the person leading the interview should be different from who is taking notes.  It can be difficult to be fully engaged in the conversation and take effective notes at the same time.  For smaller projects, it may be necessary to do both tasks (though not ideal).
• Keep the interview on track
• Close on a positive note

After the interview session

After the interview has completed, compiling the results and integrating them with other sources is essential to maximizing the value.  This should include:

• Consolidate notes among the team
• Enter notes into a digestible format for the team to reference later
• Review findings with other opinions or working hypothesis
• Schedule follow up interviews

For a great deep dive on expert interviews, see DeepBench’s 20-page guide to performing effective expert interviews. 

How can the reMarkable 2 tablet assist with expert interviews?

Since I bought a reMarkable 2 in 2020, I’ve been using it for many of my business tasks (including daily organization, marking up slides, reviewing PDFs, and signing documents).  So, it has felt very natural to extend it’s use to expert interviews.  One thing that I really like about the reMarkable 2 is that it’s simplicity and limited capabilities inspire focus.  This high level of focus is critical in the time bound world of expert interviews.  Below are areas (and how to perform) that I’ve found the reMarkable 2 quite helpful for expert interviews:

reMarkable 2 to prep for expert interviews

As mentioned above, preparation is critical to expert interview success.  I use my reMarkable 2 to collect insights during the research phase and even have started typing out my interview guides.  Having used paper notebooks (like Moleskins or spiral bounds), I find that physically writing out notes and findings really helps me remember them (which is supported by research). 

• Background research – the reMarkable 2 is very well suited for taking notes during the initial research phase of any new project.  Note taking is obviously critical to having references as well as just committing the new information to memory.  I create new reMarkable notebooks for different workstreams to keep myself organized. 
• Interview guide – building an effective interview guide could be an article of its own.  But in general, I’ll type out the interview guide on either the Type Folio or in MS Word.  This allows me to logically structure my questions and then test with others for missing areas.  You can also integrate any standard boiler plate comments that are required by your organization.  If I built my interview guide in Word, I will convert it to PDF and then drop it into Connect (so I have it on my reMarkable). This is the same procedure as exporting a Power Point presentation to PDF.

reMarkable 2 during an expert interview

The actual interview is gameday for this task and the reMarkable 2 absolutely shows up for it.  Beyond expert interviews, I really like the reMarkable 2 for in-person meets or one-on-ones because it allows me to completely focus on the situation.  While I used to take notes on my laptop during expert interviews, I always struggled with the inevitable distractions of new emails (or Teams messages) coming in or the lure of checking the news. 

• Use the interview guide – If I am leading the expert interview, I will use my interview guide (from my reMarkable) to steer the conversation.  This starts with boiler plate and then delves into the specific questions.  By using my PDF interview guide from my reMarkable 2, I minimize my personal level of distraction during the session.  If I’m the interviewer (and not taking the primary notes), I will generally take a couple of side notes on additional areas to probe or other areas to explore later. 
• Take notes during the interview – If I am the designated note taker, I will use my reMarkable 2 to take handwritten notes next to my bulletized questions on the interview guide.  It’s important to structure your guide to leave enough room for these handwritten notes.  I prefer hand written because it allows me the flexibility to draw things or connect portions with an arrow.
  • If new subjects some up during the session, I will add an unstructured notes page to the end of the interview guide.  I will also use this space to draw out conceptual frameworks for how the expert is describing or organizing a facet of the discussion. 

reMarkable 2 after an expert interview

Once the interview is complete, the work is not quite done.  Quickly organizing and synthesizing the findings from the interview is essential to integrating them with other sources of insight.  The reMarkable makes it easy to share out the raw handwritten notes or convert them to text for further refining. 

• Consolidate notes – after the session, I will schedule time to read my notes and make any necessary edits for clarity (or poor penmanship).  Using my reMarkable, I can share the handwritten notes as a PDF back to my work email or with colleagues. 
• Share notes with the team – To further consolidate the insights from a session, a team may chose to file them in a data base or Excel file to make managing specific insights and sources easier.  In this case, I will convert the handwritten notes to text (more on how to do that here).  This will allow team members to easily copy and paste the notes into the data file (which is a huge improvement from re-typing notes afterward).