The problem we saw in students
Students can read The Mom Test and work through customer discovery, then come back from a dozen interviews with a polished slide that sounds right and isn't. They rarely get to practice against someone who knows the domain well enough to refuse a shallow framing, and when they do, the social gap keeps them from asking the naive question or being wrong out loud. We saw the same pattern with industry innovation teams in the Saudi and ITRI programs, where the gap was between a technology idea and an operational problem someone senior had lived with for decades.
Runs multi-session interviews with a real expert. Decides when to probe for a specific instance, when to flag a thin region, and when to schedule a re-interview to reconcile contradictions. Output is the expert's problem representation, which the expert reviews and can veto.
Embodies that representation. Students interview it as if it were the expert. It tolerates repeated failure, answers good questions with concrete stories, pushes back on pitches and hypotheticals, and keeps the expert's own uncertainty intact.
Generates plausible-but-wrong restatements the student must tell apart from accurate ones, so nobody passes by echoing vocabulary. Difficulty adapts to demonstrated depth.
During the real interview, the proxy listens in and suggests good follow-up questions, what to probe, and where the team's understanding of the problem is still weak or inconsistent with what the expert has said.
Blind raters score question quality and problem comprehension in the real interviews. Transfer to the live conversation is the outcome we care about.
How the study uses it
| Arm | What teams get |
|---|---|
| Full system | Proxy-Expert practice plus adversarial verification, alongside the course's normal customer-discovery sequence. |
| Ablated (candidates, pre-registered) | Verification removed; or proxy interaction reduced to reading the problem brief; or lower-fidelity proxy built from less interview depth. |
Random assignment at the team level across E145, MS&E 272, and the international professional-development program. Every team gets a working tool, only the version differs.
Where it generalizes
Any setting where the scarce resource is access to someone who knows the domain: corporate and government innovation teams, engineering capstones, design studios, clinical and legal training. The demo uses an industrial maintenance expert because that problem space came up repeatedly with the international industry cohorts.