What Will They Ask?

7 types of questions to prepare for before your next industry presentation or meeting

You’ve prepared your slides. You’ve rehearsed your presentation. You’ve checked your timing.

Then the presentation ends, and someone asks a question you weren’t expecting.

For many researchers, Q&A feels like the least predictable part of an important industry conversation. You control what goes into your slides. You can practice what you plan to say.

But you can’t know exactly what someone else will ask.

That doesn’t mean you can’t prepare.

I Captured 86 Questions. Here’s What I Found.

Several years ago, I was evaluating 12 hard-tech business opportunities during the selection finals for Innovation Crossroads, the Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Each finalist gave a 10-minute presentation followed by 15 minutes of Q&A.

In other words, more time was devoted to the Q&A than to the presentation itself.

So I started writing down the questions.

By the end of the event, I had captured 86 questions asked by evaluators that included laboratory leadership, corporate stakeholders, investors, and technical experts.

I removed identifying information and analyzed the questions. What initially looked like a wide range of individual questions fell into seven recurring categories.

Question Type	Share of Questions
Results	30.2%
Target Condition	20.9%
Methodology	17.4%
Current Condition	16.3%
Strategic Fit	8.1%
Next Steps	4.7%
Unforced Errors	2.3%

Those percentages are specific to this particular event. Your next audience, meeting, or presentation may produce a very different mix.

The useful insight is the pattern.

You can’t predict every question. But you can prepare for the types of questions you’re likely to be asked.

1. Current Condition

How well do you understand the environment you’re trying to change?

These questions probe your understanding of the world surrounding your research, not just the research itself.

You might be asked about current solutions, industry benchmarks, competitors, regulatory requirements, technical limitations, or broader trends.

For example:

What is the current industry baseline performance for this metric?

The person asking may be trying to determine whether you understand how your work fits into the environment in which it would eventually be used.

2. Target Condition

What does the world look like if this works?

Researchers naturally spend a lot of time explaining what they are doing now. External audiences may also want to understand what becomes possible if the work succeeds.

Questions in this category explore future performance, adoption, impact, scale, and even new challenges that might emerge.

For example:

What does steady-state adoption of this technology look like in five years?

A strong technical result is only part of the story. Your audience may also be trying to understand what that result could enable.

3. Methodology

What critical decisions have you made, and why?

For a researcher, “methodology” may immediately bring experimental design to mind. An industry audience may define it more broadly.

They may ask about your technical approach, manufacturing strategy, analytical methods, partnership strategy, business model, or path to market.

For example:

Why did you choose this analytical approach instead of the alternatives?

These questions often probe the reasoning behind your choices, not simply what you did.

4. Results

How has your work performed against meaningful benchmarks?

Results accounted for the largest share of the questions I captured.

External audiences may want to understand how your results compare with current alternatives, how the technology performs under realistic conditions, which milestones you have reached, and what conclusions the data actually support.

For example:

How does this performance compare directly with the current state of the art?

A result becomes much easier to evaluate when your audience understands the benchmark against which it should be judged.

5. Next Steps

What happens from here?

Your audience may understand the research and still want to know what comes next.

These questions probe upcoming milestones, resources, timelines, dependencies, and contingency plans.

For example:

What are the key milestones you need to reach over the next 12 to 18 months?

The underlying question is often about the path between today’s result and tomorrow’s opportunity.

6. Strategic Fit

Why does this opportunity make sense for this audience or organization?

These questions test whether you understand the priorities of the people you are talking with.

You might be asked about alignment with an organization’s priorities, existing relationships, available resources, complementary capabilities, or potential collaborations.

For example:

How does this work align with our current focus areas?

You aren’t only explaining your work. You’re helping someone understand its relevance to their environment.

7. Unforced Errors

I’m confused. What do you mean?

A few questions in the dataset weren’t really about the opportunity at all.

They resulted from avoidable confusion: an undefined acronym, missing units, a visual that wasn’t to scale, or information that appeared contradictory.

These represented only a small percentage of the questions I captured, but they may be the most preventable.

Every minute spent resolving avoidable confusion is a minute that isn’t being spent discussing the substance of your work.

Don’t Just Predict the Question. Ask Why They’re Asking It.

Knowing the seven categories gives you a better starting point for anticipating questions.

But there is another layer.

Suppose someone asks:

What testing have you done outside the laboratory?

They may literally want to know what testing you have completed. But they may also be trying to understand something larger:

• Risk: What could still go wrong?
• Readiness: How close is this to real-world use?
• Integration: Will this work outside a controlled environment?
• Credibility: Is there enough evidence to support the claims?

The same question can carry different motivations depending on who is asking and why.

Understanding the motivation matters more than perfect wording.

When you understand what someone is trying to learn, you can prepare for the conversation rather than simply memorize answers.

Preparing for Q&A Improves Your Presentation

There is an added benefit to doing this work before the meeting.

As you anticipate questions, you may realize that an important benchmark is missing. You may discover that you haven’t adequately explained why a result matters. Or you may identify supporting data that should be ready on a backup slide.

In other words, Q&A preparation doesn’t just help you answer questions.

It can make the presentation itself stronger.

Preparing for Q&A improves your presentation before you ever deliver it.

You won’t predict every question.

You don’t need to.

Prepare for the patterns. Think about what’s behind the questions. And build a Question Bank that gets stronger every time you put your research in front of someone new.

USE THE TOOL