Product Judgement & Domain Expertise
Des Traynor ( Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer) and Paul Adams ( SVP of product at Intercom) published a podcast last week on why understanding your customer is key to good product judgment. I agree with pretty much a lot of what was written (yep I read it since i don’t listen to podcasts, since I like to focus deeply on my reading) but one of the things that they spoke about toward the end of the article is that product judgement (intuition, and sense are other terms used to describe judgement as well) is domain specific.
In other words to build up product judgement you need to understand the domain well. While I do agree that domain specific expertise is extremely important for B2B products, I’ll argue that it is less important for B2C products. What exactly does a ‘domain expert’ mean for certain products? This is the reason a lot of the top companies hire generalists as consumer product managers.
Needless to say, there are always exceptions. As an example, think about an ML (Machine Learning) product manager, he or she can probably transfer to a different product and build ML features a little bit easier. Domain knowledge is important and maybe even ML expertise.
With that here is the excerpt from the podcast:
Here’s a good example. What I’m going to get into here is the idea that product judgment is domain specific. When I joined Intercom, which is now I guess nearing seven years, or something like that, like I said earlier, I’ll use Gmail for example because I think it makes sense. I worked on Gmail and I interviewed hundreds of people, watched hundreds of people use Gmail over the years. So I feel like back then I was pretty, maybe expert even in thinking about email, how people use email, et cetera.
So I come to Intercom, Intercom’s a customer communications product and email is a communications product, and there’s similarities in the product. You can send messages and reply to people and talk and tag conversations and so on. But I remember when I joined Intercom I had way less of the sharp view and product judgment. I remember like you, Des, had spent, I think Intercom was 18 months out at that stage or, maybe two years. You and Eoghan and David and Ciaran had been working there for two years. And I remember – I can see this now looking back – you had very strong product judgment when it comes to Intercom. I had zero. I’d never watched any Intercom customer using the product. I’d not talked to one single Intercom customer. I, at the time kind of blindly assumed that because I could design Gmail, I could design Intercom. Because they’re generally the same-ish in a way.
And that was partly right and partly wrong. It was partly wrong in that I had no idea how B2B customer communications products were working. I’d never worked in it before. I’m sure, Des, you remember I made some pretty bad designs?
I’d argue here that Gmail is fully a B2C product even though GSuite is for companies. Gmail is no different between B2C and B2B in this case. Sure you might have more social features in a personal Gmail but overall the product is the same - it sends email (it is used for communications). The example of Intercom’s products are in the context of B2B. How would a persona (a sales rep or a customer service agent) use the product to either sell or help a customer. That is where I think domain expertise helps. Do you have knowledge of sales or customer service as business functions in an organization? If so that will help you build that product better.
Let’s take a look at a few products and try to identify what (if anything) would qualify as domain expertise”
Education/Learning : Duolingo
What does domain expertise look like for a product like Duolingo? Do you need to be a language expert? A learning expert? A growth/hack expert? A behavioural econ expert to get users to use the products again? I pulled up a job description for them (since job postings are transient I have captured a screenshot). There is a requirement for a linguist but thats still not a hard requirement but other than that there are generic requirements here.
Dating : Bumble
Ha! This is a good one. What does a domain expert for a dating product look like … you know it’s coming. Someone who has dated a lot? A growth person? Someone with a history of matchmaking? Could potentially be any of these folks
Workplace Social : Blind
I guess for Blind, one needs to be an expert in toxic communication? Sorry I could not help take a jibe at Blind. Again Blind has a decent product but what domain expertise would they look for in a Product Manager? Someone who has managed and moderated communities?
Travel : Airbnb
In this case there are some possibilities of expertise at play. For example if you have domain expertise in the hotel industry or timeshares or real estate you might have better product judgement than someone who doesn’t have that experience but again from a job description it seems less important
Let’s look at a couple of job posting examples where this differs:
Product Manager at AWS (There are some more specific tech skills listed even though they are “preferred”. I strongly suspect one won’t get through the interview without some technical skills since its a technical product (been an engineer in the past for example)
Payments Product Manager at Roku
Payments PM’s require an expertise in risk, payment systems, integrations, API’s etc. It's all back-end product.
Product Manager at Adobe, Creative Cloud for SMB
Requires B2B Saas experience, hopefully experience with Creative Cloud
In closing, it is probably easier for the Duolingo Product Manager to more easily learn the “domain” and perform well as the Product Manager for Blind. The Roku payments PM on the other hand might need to learn a bit more about SaaS Product and Creative Cloud to do the job well. In other words the Roku payments PM will need to learn the “domain”
These are not perfect examples and this isn’t an indication that one cannot (or can) switch from one product to another for B2B or B2C products. There are probably many examples where this doesn’t hold true but there is still value in understanding both these. This also does not mean that a person switching from one consumer product into another does not need to understand the domain.
Comments, feedback, and opinions are welcome!
