Interview Planner

Plan which workflows to capture and who to invite before you send Scout sessions.

The Interview Planner is a chat-based agent that helps you scope an engagement before any recordings go out. You describe what process or department you want to understand, and it proposes a slate of people to interview, the workflow each should document, and the topics the AI interviewer should probe. It is built for transformation leads and admins who are kicking off a project and need to decide where to point Scout.

When to use it

Reach for the planner at the start of a project, when you are deciding what to capture and who to talk to. It is the step before Members & Invitations: instead of assigning sessions one at a time, you plan the whole first round in one place and send the invitations together.

Opening the Planner

Go to Scout (the AI Interviewer area) and click Plan interviews in the top toolbar. On a fresh project with no sessions yet, the same button appears in the empty state.

Confirm the project shown in the workspace switcher is the engagement you are planning for. The planner scopes its suggestions, departments, and coverage to that project, and a plan cannot be sent without a project selected.

Sending invitations requires the invite permission, and adding people who are not yet in the project requires organization-management permission. If you only have the invite permission, you can still plan and send to existing project members.

Describing Your Goals

The planner works like a conversation. Tell it, in plain language, what the engagement is about and what you want out of it. The more context you give, the better the first draft.

Start a New planning chatand describe your focus, for example "we're mapping the weekly press scheduling process at the Fort Pierce plant". You can paste kickoff or call notes directly into the chat.

Answer the planner's discovery questions. For a vague or first-touch ask, it asks a short batch of questions about where the process starts and ends, what the engagement should produce (a process map, a time and effort baseline, automation candidates), which roles or people you already have in mind, and any constraints such as slate size or people not to contact. Most questions come with tappable options, and you can always type a custom answer or just keep chatting.

When you are ready, ask it to draft the plan. If you have already given rich context, it will draft right away.

Describing goals to the interview planner — Describing goals to the interview planning agent.

The planner grounds its picks in your actual project. It checks your departments and process categories, who has already been interviewed, gaps surfaced by Architect, and the people directory, so it can suggest real, un-interviewed people and explain why it chose each one. On a brand-new project with no data yet, it proposes a role-based slate (the functions that touch the process end to end) and leaves names blank for you to fill in.

Reviewing the Proposed Plan

When the planner drafts a plan, a plan card appears in the chat. This card is the review surface, and proposing is not sending. Nothing goes out until you press send.

A proposed interview plan with sessions and people to invite.

Each invitee on the card is fully editable, with changes saved automatically as you type. Per person you can review and adjust:

Name and email — Start typing a name to search your people directory and fill in their email and department in one click, or enter someone new.
Workflow to document — The specific process this person will be recorded walking through.
What to ask and Interview topics — The context and category set the AI interviewer will probe. Add a topic, or describe a refocus in plain language and the planner rewrites the topic set.
Message to invitee — The short note the person reads before they start, such as how long to plan for and what to have open.
Notes — Assumptions to confirm and reminders for you, kept separate from the grounded rationale.

A status pill on each row shows what will happen on send: Ready for existing project members, Will add to project for people already in your organization, Needs signup for external emails, and Needs contact info for role-only placeholders. You can remove anyone, and you can copy a plan summary to share for sponsor sign-off before sending.

Sending the Invitations

Once the plan looks right, turn it into real Scout interview invitations from the same card.

Make sure every person you want to include has a name and email. Rows still marked Needs contact info are skipped until you fill them in.

Click Review & send. The planner adds organization members and external invitees to the project as needed, then sends each person their interview invitation by email, grouped by the workflow and topics you set.

Check the per-row results. Sent invitees show as Invited, externals show Awaiting signup until they join (their interview invite follows automatically), and any failures are flagged with a reason.

Tip

If you sent a partial round, fill in contact info for the skipped placeholders later and use Send remaining on the same card. Invitations already sent are never duplicated.

Important

The planner never sends on its own. It only drafts and proposes, and the send button is the single path that creates invitations. Review every invitee before sending, since these are real people at your client or organization.

Standing Guidance

Per-interview specifics live on the plan card, but durable preferences belong in your Guidance documents, reachable from the planner sidebar. When you state a standing rule ("always dig into compliance", "keep interviews under 30 minutes", "never contact the exec team directly"), the planner can save it into the guidance for the organization or a specific project, and future plans and interview topics follow it. The People directory, also in the sidebar, accumulates the names, roles, and notes the planner learns, so later rounds can pull in the right people faster.

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