SME collaboration, reconsidered: the preview
The async-first SME workflow we wrote about all year was half-right. Two hundred real interviews and a year of customer data later, here is what we got right, what we got wrong, and what the canonical post tomorrow will argue.
Tomorrow’s post is the canonical piece on SME collaboration. This one is the preview — what changed in our thinking between the first stop-CCing-your-SMEs post and tomorrow’s pillar.
The early posts argued for async-first SME workflows. That was correct but incomplete. After interviewing roughly 200 SMEs and proposal managers across the year, the part we got wrong was treating async as the goal. Async is a tactic. The goal is changing the economic tradeoff the SME is making when they decide whether to engage with proposal work.
What we got right
The async-first thesis held up. Calendar invites for SME interviews are bad. Synchronous SME meetings burn the most expensive calendar slots and produce uneven outputs depending on who happens to attend. The shadow-SMEs post on adding shadow attendees — also held up. Mid-level SMEs absorb context from senior-SME interviews and become the next tier of contributors; that pattern works.
The Slack-bot pattern from the SME Slack bot architecture post also worked, with one caveat. SMEs respond to Slack pings inside their existing context. They do not respond well to Slack pings that pull them into a new tool.
What we got wrong
We argued that better async tooling would solve SME collaboration. That was a tooling answer to an economic problem.
The Qorus number — 48% of teams have called SME collaboration their top challenge for five consecutive years — is not a tooling failure. It is steady-state. Five years of new tooling have not moved it. New async tooling is not going to move it either.
What moves it is changing the SME’s economic tradeoff. The senior engineer who spends 100 hours per RFP on proposal work is making a tradeoff: those hours could be billable, or strategic, or development time. Proposal work pays in goodwill — it does not pay in performance reviews, comp, or career trajectory. A workflow change that does not change this tradeoff fails. A tool that demands less of the SME’s time changes the tradeoff at the margin. A pattern that removes the SME from the workflow on the questions where they are not actually needed changes the tradeoff at the structural level.
The shift in framing
The right question is not “how do we make SME collaboration easier.” It is “how do we make sure the SME is only touched on the questions that genuinely require their judgment, and that the touch produces durable content the team never has to ask again.”
This is the compounding thesis applied to SMEs. An SME interview that produces a one-off draft is one expensive interaction. An SME review that produces a versioned, owned, freshness-tracked KB block that gets reused 10 times across the next quarter is the same expense amortized differently. The work the SME did is the same. The economic return is 10x.
What tomorrow argues
Tomorrow’s piece is the canonical synthesis. It argues that the tooling categories that have tried to solve SME collaboration with “better communication” have all failed for the same reason. The category that works is content reuse with freshness discipline — and even that has limits.
It also argues that we, as a category, have been too generous with the SME. We talk about SME wrangling as if the SME is a passive resource being mismanaged. Some SMEs are. Others are deliberately disengaged because the proposal function has not earned their time. The piece will name that pattern.
The two interview patterns that actually changed our thinking
Two specific interview findings sharpened the new framing.
The “I will not engage at all” SME. About 12% of the SMEs we interviewed described some version of “I do not engage with proposal asks until my manager escalates.” This is rational behavior given how proposal contributions are weighted in performance reviews. Software cannot fix this; the only fix is the SME’s manager including proposal contributions as a measured deliverable. We had been writing as if every SME wanted to engage but lacked the right tools. That is wrong for a meaningful slice.
The “I write the same paragraph every quarter” SME. Roughly 40% of SMEs we interviewed described re-writing the same answers across multiple bids in a quarter. They knew the answer was repeating; they did not have a way to prevent the re-write. The KB exists in their company; they did not trust it because the freshness signals were not visible to them. They wrote from scratch defensively. The fix is not asking the SME to trust the KB — it is making the KB’s freshness signals visible enough that defensive re-writing becomes unnecessary.
Both of these were available in last year’s data and we did not weight them correctly. The async-first writing was correct about what good looks like. It was not correct about why most teams could not get there.
What I would tell a proposal lead today
If I were running a proposal function and reading tomorrow’s piece for the first time, the operational change I would prioritize: spend two weeks instrumenting your KB’s freshness state. How many blocks are over 12 months without verification? Who owns the orphans? What is the median freshness of the blocks the team most often retrieves?
The data is uncomfortable. Most teams find that 30 to 60% of the blocks they actually use have not been touched in a year. That is the rot the Loopio review summary describes from the customer side. Seeing it from your own side is the prompt to actually fix it.
I will close this preview the way I will not close tomorrow’s piece: I think we will be wrong about something here too. The reason this problem has been steady-state for five years is that it is genuinely hard. We are arguing one direction with conviction. Some of the conviction will turn out to be wrong inside the next 18 months. That is fine. The goal is to argue specifically enough to be testable.