The second-question rule for SME asks

A small habit that consistently halves the time a proposal manager waits on an SME: ask one concrete question, not two, and save the open-ended one for the follow-up.

The bad version: “Hey, can you describe our incident response process and let me know what’s changed in the last 12 months and any examples of recent incidents we’ve handled well?” Three asks, one message. The SME reads it on Slack, decides it’s a half-hour task, and defers it. By the time they get back to it, the proposal manager has cobbled something together from the KB and shipped a worse answer.

The good version: “What’s our current MTTR for Sev-1 incidents in production?” One question. One number. The SME types two minutes of an answer, sends it back, and the proposal manager replies, “Thanks. Quick follow-up: anything notable about how we got there in the last 12 months?” Now the SME is engaged, the proposal manager has a hook, and the second question gets a better answer than it would have gotten cold.

This is not a productivity hack — it is an asymmetry in how SMEs read questions. A concrete question gets answered because answering it is small. An open-ended question gets deferred because answering it well takes thought. Open-ended questions are the right questions, but they are follow-ups, not openers.

Qorus’s research on the SME bottleneck — 48% of teams calling SME collaboration their top problem for five years running — is partly a tooling problem and partly a question-design problem. Better tooling helps with delivery (we wrote about the SME Slack bot earlier this week). Question design is a workflow choice that costs nothing to fix.

One concrete question first. The open-ended one second. The order is the rule.