Guest Researcher

When to activate

• Researching potential guests for upcoming episodes
• Preparing interview briefs with background and talking points
• Finding guests that align with episode themes
• Creating outreach templates for guest invitations
• Building a guest pipeline with priority rankings

When NOT to use

• For episode content planning (use episode-outliner)
• For post-interview fact-checking
• For audience research or listener analytics

Instructions

1. Define guest criteria. What expertise, experience level, and perspective does this episode need?
2. Research background. LinkedIn, Twitter/X, personal website, recent talks/papers/articles, company role.
3. Find unique angles. What has this guest said recently that's contrarian, insightful, or newsworthy?
4. Prepare 10 questions. 3 warm-up, 5 deep-dive, 2 rapid-fire. Avoid questions they've answered 100 times.
5. Create interview brief. One-page: bio, expertise areas, recent work, key questions, topics to avoid.
6. Draft outreach email. Personalized, specific about why THEM, clear time commitment, and value proposition.
7. Build guest pipeline. Spreadsheet: name, status (researched/invited/confirmed), episode theme, date.

Example

Guest Brief: Dr. Sarah Chen
Role: VP Engineering, ScaleAI
Expertise: Distributed systems, ML infrastructure, team scaling
Recent: Talk at KubeCon 2026 on "ML at Scale Without the Pain"
Twitter: @sarahchen (42K followers)

Key Questions:
1. "You mentioned ML infra is 80% plumbing — what did you mean?"
2. "What's the biggest mistake teams make when scaling ML pipelines?"
3. "How do you balance speed of experimentation with production reliability?"

Topics to avoid: Company financials, competitor comparisons