Content Strategy: For the Subject Matter Expert Who Hates Writing

Early in my career, before I got into product marketing and technology evangelism, I spent several years as a Business Analyst and Technical Writer. A big part of that job was sitting down with engineers, architects, and developers, asking a lot of questions, and then helping them document what they had built. The goal was always to eventually get them doing more of it themselves. And almost without exception, the first thing I heard from nearly every one of them was some version of “I’m not a writer” or “I wouldn’t even know where to start.” People who could explain a complex distributed system architecture in a whiteboard session with perfect clarity would completely freeze the moment you put a blank document in front of them and asked them to write it down.

That gap between knowing something and being willing to put it into words has never left my thinking. It’s one of the most consistent patterns I’ve seen across every organization I’ve worked with since.

This article is part of my ongoing Content Strategy series, and it’s aimed squarely at the people who run content programs, manage editorial calendars, or are simply trying to get good ideas out of their organizations and into the world. Because the people who have the most valuable things to say are often the ones least likely to say them in writing, and if your content strategy doesn’t have a plan for that, you are leaving some of your best material on the table.

The Real Problem Isn’t Writing. It’s the Ask.

When most people talk about getting subject matter experts (SMEs) to contribute content, they frame it as a writing problem. But it usually isn’t. The expertise is there. The perspective is there. What’s missing is a bridge between what the person knows and the format you’re asking them to produce.

Telling a senior engineer or a deeply experienced consultant to “write a blog post” is a surprisingly high bar. It assumes they know how to structure an argument for a general audience, that they have time to sit with a blank page, and that they’re comfortable publishing their thinking publicly. Most aren’t, and most don’t.

The reframe that actually works is this: your job is to extract and shape the expertise. Their job is just to share it. The writing part is your problem to solve, not theirs.

Start with a Conversation, Not a Document

The most effective content extraction tool I’ve used, and the one I still rely on most often, is a simple recorded conversation. You sit down with the expert for 20 to 30 minutes, ask good questions, and let them talk. You’re not interviewing them for a podcast necessarily, though that’s one option. You’re just capturing how they think about a topic in the way they actually think about it, which is usually nothing like how they’d write about it.

A few things that make these conversations productive:

• Come in with specific questions, not open-ended prompts. “What do people most commonly misunderstand about X?” and “What’s the thing you see organizations get wrong most often?” are much better entry points than “Tell me about your area of expertise.”
• Ask for the counterintuitive take. The most useful material almost always lives in what the expert believes that contradicts conventional wisdom. Push for that.
• Record everything and transcribe it. Transcription tools are cheap and fast now, and AI makes turning a raw transcript into a working draft easier than it has ever been. The expert never has to touch a keyboard to produce the raw material.

Once you have a transcript, you’re not far from a first draft. You have their actual language, their real perspective, and usually at least one or two moments where they said something genuinely sharp that you couldn’t have made up.

Lower the Barrier to Contribution

Not every SME will sit still for a recorded interview, and not every insight comes from a scheduled conversation. You need more than one entry point into the expertise inside your organization or network.

• Voice memos are underrated. Some people who would never open a doc will send you a three-minute voice memo explaining exactly why a particular approach to a problem is flawed. Treat those as content seeds.
• Reaction formats are even lower friction. Show the person something, a customer question, a piece of competitor content, a recent industry announcement, and ask them what they think. Their reaction is the content. You’re just capturing it.
• FAQ and Q&A structures work well because the expert isn’t writing a blog post, they’re answering a question. That’s a completely different cognitive task and a much more natural one for most people who spend their days answering questions from clients or colleagues.
• Existing presentations and recorded talks are often the most overlooked source. If someone has already stood up at a conference or an internal all-hands and explained something well, that content exists. It just needs to be extracted and reshaped.

Shape It, Then Get Their Sign-Off

Once you have raw material, the editorial work is yours to do. That means finding the specific claim buried in the general observation, cutting the qualifications that obscure the point, and making sure there’s an actual perspective in the piece, not just information.

The most common mistake in ghostwritten or translated content is that it ends up being accurate but opinion-free. Push for a stance. “Here’s what I think you should do” is more useful and more readable than “here are some considerations.”

When you have a draft, share it with the SME before it publishes, and walk them through your editorial choices. Not just for approval, but to make them a collaborator. Experts who feel like the final piece actually sounds like them are far more likely to participate again. Experts who feel like their words got sanitized into generic marketing copy are done.

Make the Outcome Visible

One of the most reliable ways to build a sustainable pipeline of SME content is simply to show people that it worked. When a piece lands well, tell the contributor. Share the engagement numbers, the comments, the reach. Subject matter experts who see that their thinking was genuinely useful to an audience outside their immediate network are often surprised, and that surprise is usually the thing that converts a reluctant one-time contributor into someone who starts flagging topics on their own.

The knowledge that lives inside your best thinkers is not going to document itself. But with the right process around it, you don’t need them to become writers. You just need them to start talking.