Reduce what you need from them and make their time cheap. Do the homework first from documents and data, arrive with a draft to correct rather than a blank page, and ask for short focused sessions instead of open ended ones. If it stays blocked, escalate it as a project risk with the delay quantified, not as a complaint about a person.
Why interviewers ask this
This is one of the most common real obstacles in the job, and interviewers want practical tactics rather than frustration. They listen for the correct a draft technique, which is far more efficient than asking open questions, for respecting the expert's day job, and for escalation framed as a quantified schedule risk. Complaining about the individual is the answer that fails.
How to structure your answer
- Do the preparation yourself so you need less of their time.
- Bring a draft to be corrected rather than open questions.
- Ask for short, specific sessions at their convenience.
- Find secondary sources: documents, data, adjacent colleagues.
- Escalate as a quantified risk, never as a complaint.
Example answer
I assume their day job is genuinely busier than my project, so my aim is to need less of their time rather than more of it. First I get everything I can from documents, the system itself, and people adjacent to them, so I am not spending an expert on things I could have found out myself. Then I bring a draft and ask them to correct it. People will happily spend fifteen minutes telling you what is wrong with a diagram when they will not give you an hour of open questions, and you get better information because they are reacting rather than recalling. I book short specific sessions, and I send the questions ahead. If it is still blocked after that, I raise it as a risk with a number attached, so the message is that we lose about two weeks if we cannot get four hours of this person, and I let their manager decide. That is a resourcing conversation, not a complaint.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- What do you do if their manager will not release the time either?
- How do you validate requirements you gathered without the main expert?
- How do you handle an expert who gives you contradictory answers?
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