Getting The Most Out Of Subject Matter Experts

Subject Matter Experts (also known as SMEs) can deliver great insight into how users work and what designs would be best for them. Unfortunately, we often don’t use them to their fullest.

There’s a way to make SMEs highly valuable. However, it’s not the way most teams do it.

Experts with Narrow Expertise

Most subject matter experts come to this role because they’ve done the users’ job themselves, often for a long time. They have deep knowledge and experience about how the job gets done and how best to accomplish it.

This knowledge and experience often far outweighs the rest of the team’s direct knowledge and experience of the work. Delivering that deep expertise is beneficial, for sure.

While we bring SMEs into our project team because of their expertise, it’s that expertise that creates a problem. Though they have deep knowledge and expertise, they don’t know everything there is to know about every user and all of their needs. Their expertise only covers the experience they had when they did that job.

Even with that limitation, they still know much more than the rest of the team, none of whom have ever done the job users do. But they don’t know everything.