Interview, a recurring pair, narrated, or panel. The format you choose decides how much of your partners' time the show costs. Here is how to pick.
By Will Nash
21 September 2026
Firms spend weeks agreeing what the podcast should be about and roughly ten minutes on what shape it takes. The default is an interview show, because that is what a podcast looks like from the outside.
It is also the most expensive format to run and the one most dependent on other people's diaries. Choosing deliberately here saves you a year of scheduling.
The short version: pick the format that matches whatever your firm has most of. Access to interesting guests, a pair of colleagues who are good together, or a body of written material nobody outside the firm has read.
The interview show
What it gives you is real. A reason to contact people you want to know, a guest who may share the episode with their own audience, and an easy answer to the question of what goes in the next one.
What it costs is two diaries per episode rather than one, plus cancellations, plus quality that swings with whoever turned up. Someone else's availability is now on your critical path, which makes this the format most likely to stall.
Choose it if booking good guests is genuinely easy for your firm. If you had to pause and think about that, it is not.
The recurring pair
Two colleagues in conversation, the same two people each time. There is nothing to book, and the show develops a personality that listeners return for, rather than dipping in for one guest and leaving.
The requirement is unavoidable: two people who are good together and who will keep turning up. If one of them is lukewarm, this format will expose it faster than any other.
The narrated or scripted episode
Built from something already written, whether an article, a client note, or a talk someone gave. It gives you the most control over accuracy, which matters for technical or regulated material, and it asks the least of senior diaries.
It is the least spontaneous of the options, and it lives or dies on the writing. A weak script cannot be rescued in the edit.
The panel
Three or more voices works well for a moment: an event, a set of results, a change in the rules. As a recurring format it multiplies every scheduling problem you already had, so it earns its place as an occasional special rather than a monthly commitment.
Length and cadence are part of the format
Pick a length that suits the material rather than one that matches the market. A tight eighteen minutes that people finish does more for you than fifty-five they abandon halfway.
Formats also carry very different loads. A weekly interview show and a monthly narrated show are both "a podcast" and are not remotely the same commitment.
How to choose in one pass
Ask what is genuinely abundant at your firm. If it is relationships and people who will say yes, run interviews. If you have a natural double act, run the pair. If what you have is writing that nobody outside the firm ever reads, narrated episodes turn an existing asset into a new one.
Then record one episode in that format without publishing it. It settles the argument faster than another meeting will.
Where the choice goes wrong
The common mistake is picking interviews for the reach that guests bring without having the capacity to book them. You get four good episodes and then a gap.
The other is picking narrated episodes when nobody at the firm will actually write. A format does not create material. It needs the material to exist first.
In short
Format is a resourcing decision wearing the clothes of a creative one. Match it to what your firm already has in supply, keep the length honest, and record one before you announce anything.
We are an AI-native podcast agency, and the format most of our clients land on is the one that does not put a senior diary on the critical path. We build multi-speaker episodes from the writing and thinking your experts have already done. If you are weighing which shape your show should take, get in touch.
