Even the busiest subject matter experts have great stories to tell. You just need the right techniques to unlock them. 

Let’s be honest: Interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) can be frustrating. You feel awkward; they feel awkward. You keep asking questions but don’t seem to get the kind of information you need. You leave the interview feeling as if you missed something critical, but you don’t know what or why.

That’s not a personal failing. It’s because you’re often interviewing people who sit high in their organization, are perpetually busy, and know their subject so deeply that explaining it to someone else has actually gotten harder, not easier.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the curse of knowledge. Psychologists describe expertise as moving through four stages: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. In the last stage, a skill becomes so automatic you no longer think about how you do it. 

That’s great for the expert, but it’s terrible for the person trying to interview them. Once knowledge becomes second nature, experts forget what it was like not to know it. They skip steps that feel obvious to them but aren’t obvious to a novice. They reach for jargon without noticing they’re doing it. 

Despite this difficulty, interviewing SMEs isn’t impossible. If you use the right interviewing skills, listening techniques, and follow-up questions, the content you need starts falling into your lap. 

Here are five steps to take to make that happen.

1. Study the topic before you show up. Read up on your topic beforehand. Look up whatever’s publicly available and get familiar with the technical concepts involved. AI can be a big help here. Walking into an interview with informed, research-driven questions does two things: It saves your SME from having to explain background information they assumed you’d know, and it signals that you respect their time. People who feel respected tell better stories.

2. Ask open-ended questions. This is the single biggest lever you have. Closed questions — ones that start with “Do,” “Did,” “Was,” “Is,” “Are” — invite a “yes” or “no” answer, and they often stall the conversation. Open questions — ones that start with “What,” “How,” “Why,” “Tell me about,” “Describe” — invite elaboration. For example, if you ask someone “Did you have a good trip?” you’ll probably get “Yes, thanks” in return. But say “Tell me about your trip,” and suddenly you’re hearing about the 360-degree view they had from a mesa trail outside Santa Fe and the rattlesnake they nearly stepped on. Same trip, wildly different material to work with.

3. Listen carefully — and use silence. Stay present. Let an AI notetaking tool handle the transcript so you can focus on the conversation instead of your notepad. Then try a technique that can feel unnatural but often works wonders: silence. Resist the urge to fill a pause. Just sit quietly after your question or their answer. Silence gives your SME room to think further and often prompts them to volunteer details they’d left out. (Pro tip: Even if I’m using an AI notetaker, I often handwrite notes anyway. This allows the SME a moment to think without me awkwardly staring at them, seemingly pressuring them to speak.)  

4. Ask follow-up questions. One of the most important lessons I ever learned as a copywriter is that the first answer you get from an SME is rarely the best one. Two simple follow-up questions can evoke much richer responses: “What else?” and “Then what happened?” Ask these questions again and again, and a flat statement like “The foundation was tough to build” suddenly turns into a story about how the construction team had to drive 192 concrete piles 50 meters into the ground to create stability. Pair these questions with mirroring — repeating back the last few words an SME said, like “50 meters into the ground?” — and you’ll find they keep going, correcting or expanding on what they just told you.

5. Paraphrase what you heard. This confirms your understanding, shows the SME you were listening, and gives them a chance to correct anything you may have misinterpreted. It also lets you start translating the SME’s jargon into plain language in real time, rather than guessing at their meaning later at your desk.

One other thing to note: If you document your interview using an AI tool (I like Granola, but there are lots of other choices), make sure it produces both a summary and a full transcript. Beyond freeing you up to listen, a good transcript lets you go back and “talk to” the material later — pulling up quotes, spotting the moments when the real story showed up, and drafting faster because the raw content is already there.

In short, leading a great interview doesn’t require charisma or 30 years of experience. It requires only preparation, curiosity, and a willingness to sit in silence a beat longer than feels comfortable. Do that consistently, and your SMEs will start handing you the content and quotes you need, one good story at a time.

Want to learn more? Join me on October 23, at 1 p.m., for a live webinar. I’ll share more examples, details, and stories on conducting great interviews.