---
name: sme-interview-for-source-material
description: Use when a page needs expertise nobody on the content team has and the expert will give you an hour at most.
---

# Interview a Subject Expert for Source Material

Content teams routinely cover subjects they do not practise, so the draft gets assembled from other people's articles and reads exactly like that. The obvious remedy, sending the finished draft to an internal expert for review, arrives too late: reviewers correct errors but never supply the material that would have made the page worth reading. The interview has to happen before the outline exists, and it has to be run for extractable specifics rather than general explanation.

## Ce qu’il vous faut d’abord

- the reader decision the page must serve, agreed before the call
- the current top ranking pages, read in advance, so you can ask what they get wrong
- a recorded call with a transcript, with the expert's consent recorded too
- a booked 45 to 60 minute window, because experts do not give more than that

## Méthode

1. Send three questions ahead and no more. Experts prepare answers for what they see and improvise the rest, and the improvised answers are consistently the better material.
2. Open by asking what the ranking pages get wrong. Disagreement produces sharper and more specific speech than an open invitation to explain the topic.
3. Ask for the most recent real case: what came in, what they decided, what it cost. Concrete recall yields numbers and detail that a general question never surfaces.
4. Every time you hear a rule of thumb, ask for the exception. The exception is the part nobody else on page one has written down.
5. Push every vague quantity to a figure. "It takes a while" becomes "usually six to eight weeks, longer if the survey is queued" only if you ask a second time.
6. Close by asking what they would tell a friend to avoid. This question reliably produces the strongest paragraph of the eventual page.
7. Mark the transcript into three buckets before any drafting: verbatim quotes worth attributing, facts that still need checking, and background. Everything sounds usable in speech, so never draft straight from the raw transcript.

## Ce que ça produit

A marked-up transcript plus a shortlist of roughly ten attributable claims, figures and examples, enough to brief a writer with.

## Là où ça dérape

- Spending the hour asking the expert to explain the basics, which buys you material already present on every competing page
- Interviewing after the draft exists, so the expert edits wording and never contributes the substance that would have made the page different
- Publishing a quote without letting the speaker see it in context, which is how a fair quote turns into a complaint and a retraction

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Extrait de la bibliothèque de compétences QuQi - https://www.quqi.io/fr/skills/sme-interview-for-source-material