What Instructional Designers Actually Need from SMEs

Every instructional designer has lived this: a subject matter expert hands over a stack of slides, a policy PDF, or an hour of loosely organized talking, and says “turn this into a course.” Weeks later, after three rounds of “that’s not quite right” review comments, everyone’s frustrated — and nobody can quite explain why the content kept missing the mark.

It’s rarely a bad SME. It’s usually that nobody told them what actually helps. SMEs are experts in their subject, not in how that subject becomes a course — so they hand over what feels natural to hand over: the official version, the polished summary, the “right” answer. That’s exactly the material an ID can’t build a good course from.

Here’s what actually moves a project forward.

1. The real scenario, not the policy statement

“Employees must report conflicts of interest” is a policy. It’s also useless as course content, because nobody fails a compliance course by not knowing the policy exists — they fail by not recognizing the moment it applies. What an ID actually needs is the situation: what does it look like in the room when this comes up? What does the employee see, hear, and think right before they get it wrong?

If you’re the SME, this is the single highest-value thing you can hand over: not the rule, but a real (or realistic composite) moment where the rule mattered.

2. Where people actually get it wrong

SMEs sit on the single most valuable asset in the entire project and usually never mention it: they’ve watched people mess this up in real life. Not hypothetically — actually, on the job, more than once. Those specific failure patterns are what “wrong answers” in a branching scenario should be built from. A wrong answer that’s just a strawman teaches nothing; a wrong answer built from a mistake people genuinely make is the whole reason scenario-based training works in the first place.

Ask yourself: what’s the version of this mistake I’ve actually seen someone make? That’s the content.

3. The “obvious” stuff that isn’t

Expertise makes things invisible to the expert. A SME who’s done a task for fifteen years has usually stopped noticing the judgment calls buried inside it — the exceptions, the “well, it depends,” the unwritten rule everyone on the team just knows. None of that makes it into a slide deck, because it doesn’t feel like information; it feels like common sense. It’s not common sense to a new hire, and it’s exactly what a course needs to make explicit.

4. One reviewer, fast turnaround

The single most common project killer isn’t bad content — it’s five reviewers giving four different, conflicting notes three weeks after the draft went out. Reviews work when one person owns the decision and turns it around in days, not when a whole team weighs in whenever they get to it. If multiple people need to be involved, designate one person to reconcile their feedback into a single set of notes before it comes back to the ID.

5. Real constraints, up front

Regulatory language that can’t be paraphrased, a hard deadline tied to an audit, an LMS that only accepts certain file types, a workforce that’s mostly on shared kiosk computers with no headphones — these change the design from day one. Found in week four instead of week one, the same fact just means rework. Say the constraint before there’s anything built around it.

What SMEs don’t need to worry about

This part matters as much as the list above: SMEs are not expected to design the course. Structure, interactivity, branching logic, how something gets chunked across screens — that’s the ID’s job, not yours. A lot of review friction comes from SMEs feeling like they need to have an opinion on instructional structure to be a good collaborator. You don’t. Your job is accuracy and reality. Ours is turning that into something that actually teaches — which is a different skill than most people expect.

The five questions to answer on a kickoff call

• • What does this look like when someone gets it right, in a real moment, not in policy language?

• • What’s a version of this you’ve actually seen someone get wrong?

• • What do people on your team just “know” that a new hire wouldn’t?

• • Who’s the one person who can approve content, and how fast can they turn around a review?

• • What’s non-negotiable — legally, technically, or on the calendar?

Answer those five before the first draft gets built, and most of the review cycles that normally eat a project timeline never happen — because the ID was working from the right material the whole time, instead of reverse-engineering it three drafts in. If your last few projects had SMEs and instructional designers talking past each other, this is usually the fix.

At DGS Designs, this is the first conversation we have on every project, before a single slide gets built. Contact us if you want to see what that kickoff actually looks like.