BOTH IN RESEARCH and in industry, it is widely assumed that product development experts possess knowledge that can be transferred to product development teams. However, the specifics of what and how teams can learn from experts are unclear. In order to document what actually takes place when product development experts are brought together with product development teams, expert-team interactions at the vehicle development center of a US automobile producer were studied. The goal was to gain a comprehensive understanding of the content, motives and structure of the interaction, and then to construct a product development knowledge acquisition model based on the findings. Such a model would be grounded in practice and can be used to assess the validity of the assumptions regarding knowledge transfer between experts and teams.