The question about domain expertise comes up in many conversations I have. Usually, it is my customers who are consulting with me about the profile they should look for in their new product hire, but every now and then my potential customers raise this concern regarding my ability to help them. Do I need to be a domain expert in their own domain in order to help them build a solid product strategy and find product-market fit?
My take was always that product capabilities are much more important than domain expertise. I saw it throughout my career: I wasn’t a cybersecurity expert when I joined Imperva – a cybersecurity company – to lead one of the two products they had at the time. I knew nothing about eCommerce when I joined eBay to build the product team at the Israeli R&D center, and I always listed domain expertise as “an advantage” in any job description I posted. In fact, the best product leaders I hired had no prior domain expertise when they joined me, and this is true across all companies I worked at, in very different domains.
Before we move on to explain why I believe this is the case (and how I challenged my thinking to see if it still holds), it is important to say that if you can find an amazing product leader who is also a domain expert in your domain, that’s awesome and you should definitely hire them. But in most cases, finding an amazing product leader is hard enough, and if you add the domain expertise as a requirement, it might take you forever to find one. So the real question is often not “does the product leader have to be a domain expert”, but rather “should I hire someone without domain expertise now or wait further in the hope to find the perfect candidate sometime in the future?”
This also implies the one thing I wouldn’t recommend: hiring a domain expert who isn’t a great product leader and letting them lead the product themselves. If you decide to do that, you should make sure there is someone else in the company who brings great product leadership capabilities and can help your domain expert lead with solid product thinking and practices. At the very least, you should have an external advisor and mentor (like myself) to help your domain expert become truly a great product leader.
First, Do No Harm
The first reason I believe product leadership is more important than domain expertise (again, assuming you have to choose and you don’t have the perfect candidate at hand) is that lack of product capabilities can lead you to make many more wrong decisions along the way, that would eventually lead to a much more negative impact than the other way around.
A good product leader assumes by definition that they don’t know everything there is to know about the market and the domain. Our expertise lies in asking the right questions and finding the right people (and data) to get these answers from.
A domain expert, on the other hand, who has insufficient product leadership skills, would most likely not know which questions to ask. Since they are the product leader in this example, typically no one else in the company would know that these questions are the important ones, and so the entire company can go the wrong way, which is much harder to identify and fix.
Domain Expertise Is Easier to Outsource and Develop
Since product leaders know that they need to ask questions and seek answers, it is easier for them to work alongside domain experts and use their knowledge to help them make the right decisions. These could be people within the company who are experts, or even external consultants.
Product leadership, on the other hand, involves so many decisions that need to be made at any given moment, and only a few of them require the actual domain expertise. So if you hire a domain expert who is not a product leader, they would need the help of an external product mentor almost all the time. It is for this reason, by the way, that all of my mentoring programs include my unlimited availability for supporting the product leaders between our mentoring sessions, since product leadership happens every day, all day.
Furthermore, because of the research nature of the product leader’s role (we always try to learn as much as we can to make an informed decision), we learn all the time about the market. So domain knowledge is gained naturally all the time as part of the product leader’s job. Moreover, the domain itself changes all the time, so even when a domain expert joins as a product leader, they would still need to continue learning to make sure their knowledge is still relevant and up to date.
Eventually, It Is a Matter of Speed
When I joined Twiggle as their VP Product, for the first time I did have prior domain knowledge. Given that I always believed that domain expertise is not that important and can be developed relatively easily, I challenged myself to see how my domain expertise here impacted my ability to deliver results and if my belief still holds.
As mentioned above, when you have a great product leader who happens to be a domain expert you should definitely hire them, and I believe that was one of the reasons Twiggle hired me. I can say for a fact that my domain knowledge definitely helped me make better decisions and deliver results faster. This understanding made me rethink my opinion on the domain expertise question. So I asked myself what would I have done differently if I didn’t have prior domain knowledge.
The first decision I needed to make was which product Twiggle should offer to the market. At the time, Twiggle had an amazing technology that could deliver much more relevant results in eCommerce search (think the amazon search bar and results). To demo the technology, Twiggle’s team built a search engine that showed these very relevant results even for very complex search queries. It was only natural to think that the product should be a search engine. I used my domain knowledge to convince the founders that this wasn’t the right product. At first, I thought that this could only be achieved if your product leader happens to be a domain expert. But then I realized that there were many other signals that a search engine wasn’t the right product, and that could have helped me learn the domain even if I didn’t come with that knowledge upfront. For example, all of the potential customers we were talking to at the time either had their own proprietary search engine or were building one as we were talking to them. As a product leader, I would have understood that it doesn’t make sense to offer them to migrate to Twiggle’s search engine instead. If I went to do some competitive research and see the capabilities of eCommerce search engines, I would have understood that objective relevance is only one factor and that there are many more requirements that are harder to solve from the outside (like promotions, inventory, and others) and as a startup, we couldn’t afford to address them all at once. These are just examples of signals I would have gotten from the market had I not had prior domain knowledge. This led me to believe that eventually, I would have made the same decisions, and probably not too late into the game.
So my original opinion still holds – product leadership skills are much more important for your product leader than domain expertise, but there is definitely an impact on speed. How fast would your new product leader be able to make the right decisions?
You should consider this when you insist on finding a great product leader who is also a domain expert. Which one would take you longer? Finding a great product leader and training them on your domain (perhaps with external help) or finding the perfect candidate who may or may not be there?
You know my vote: finding a great product leader is hard enough. Domain expertise can and should anyway be developed on the go. You should absolutely seek the perfect candidate, but when you can’t find them, remember that waiting for them for too long has its impact as well.
