---
aliases: ["What Makes a Good Podcast Guest"]
Is A: Evergreen
Topics: ["[[topic-podcasting]]"]
Status: Published
---
# What Makes a Good Podcast Guest
The best podcast guests are not the most famous or the most accomplished. They're the most specific.

A guest who can speak from direct experience about one particular problem — how they restructured their engineering team after a disastrous product launch, exactly what they changed in their hiring process after a bad hire — is far more valuable than a guest who can speak generally about leadership at scale.

This has changed how I approach guest outreach. Instead of starting with 'who is impressive?', I start with 'what specific thing happened to this person that would be genuinely useful to our listeners?'

After recording over a hundred podcast episodes, I have identified three qualities that separate memorable guests from forgettable ones, and none of them are fame or follower count. The first is specificity: the guest can describe a concrete situation with enough detail that the listener can picture themselves in it. "We reorganized our team" is vague. "We split a 12-person backend team into three 4-person squads, each owning a specific domain, and two of the three squad leads had never managed before" is specific enough to be useful. The second quality is honesty about failure: guests who can describe what went wrong, what they would do differently, and what it felt like to be in the middle of a mess produce episodes that resonate far more than guests who present a polished success narrative. The third is genuine curiosity: guests who ask me questions, push back on my framing, and use the conversation as genuine thinking time rather than a rehearsed performance create the kind of dialogue that listeners can actually learn from.

The selection process I use now is deliberately biased toward practitioners over thought leaders. A VP Engineering who just navigated a painful migration from monolith to microservices is a better guest than a consultant who has advised fifty companies on the same topic, because the VP has the emotional texture and the specific details that make a story believable and actionable. Thought leaders tend to speak in frameworks; practitioners tend to speak in stories. Listeners remember stories.

This has also shaped how I prepare for recordings. Instead of sending a list of questions in advance, I identify the specific experience I want the guest to share and frame the conversation around that experience. The prep call is about finding the story, not about planning the structure. Once you have the right story, the conversation structures itself. The worst episodes I have recorded were the ones where I had a detailed question list and the guest had prepared polished answers. The best episodes were the ones where we found an unexpected thread and followed it.

## Key insight
The quality of a podcast is determined primarily by guest selection and preparation, not by production value or interview technique. The most impactful selection criterion is specificity of experience: choosing guests who can share a detailed, honest account of a specific professional challenge. This requires shifting the selection question from "who is important?" to "who has a story our listeners need to hear?" The resulting episodes are more useful, more memorable, and generate more listener engagement than episodes with higher-profile guests who speak in generalities.

## Related
- [[podcasting-is-relationship-building]] — Guest selection should also consider relationship value, not just content value
- [[writing-for-clarity-vs-writing-for-credit]] — Specificity and honesty in podcasting mirror the clarity-over-credit principle in writing
- [[on-consistency-in-creative-work]] — A consistent podcast schedule forces you to develop a reliable guest pipeline
- [[procedure-podcast-recording]] — The practical procedure for finding, preparing, and recording with guests
- [[topic-podcasting]] — Broader thinking on podcasting as a medium and business
