Every project has one: the expert with fifteen years of knowledge, a 90-slide deck, and complete certainty that all of it is essential. They're not wrong that it's true. They're wrong that it's the course.
Experts can't see their own floor
The curse of expertise is real — what's obvious to an SME is invisible to them as content. The novice's actual stumbling blocks (the acronym nobody defined, the step everyone "just knows") rarely appear in the expert's slides because the expert stopped noticing them a decade ago. The designer's first job is asking the naive questions the learners can't ask yet.
Ask about failure, not content
The highest-yield SME questions aren't "what should this course cover?" They're: What do people get wrong in their first month? What question do you answer over and over? What mistake is expensive? Where do smart people stall? Ten minutes on failure modes produces a sharper outline than an hour on topics — because failure is where the learning need actually lives.
Make review a decision, not a rewrite
Send an SME a draft and you get line edits forever. Send them a structure — outcomes, sequence, one scenario per decision point — and ask them to verify it, and you get judgement, which is what you actually need them for. The best collaborations run on short, structured sessions with visible artefacts: a mind map to react to beats a blank page every time.
The expert brings the truth. The designer brings the subtraction. The course is what survives both.