A knife to your heart
Why domain expertise is a bad idea
Photo by Саша Алалыкин:
Introduction
I’ve made some bad hiring decisions and some stellar choices over the years.
I interviewed 1000+ people over the years.
Programming jobs, support, sales, marketing, business development, finance and administration. All kinds.
After 957 interviews, you can look at a person’s eyes and pretty much know if they are a good fit.
My rule of thumb was to use the eyeball test and then to hire people smarter than me.
That however is an oversimplification and not a pattern you can implement in your own business or an anti-design pattern to avoid.
This week, I will write about the DomainExpert anti-design pattern. We’ll see how DomainExpert plays into 3 hiring challenges:
Fitting a person for the job
Fitting a person for your business
Fitting your team to the task
If you ignore DomainExpert you'll be putting a knife right into the heart of your business with bad hires and bad clients.
Fitting a person for the job
To fit a person for a job, you need a job description.
It is the hiring manager’s responsibility to write the description. A good job description must be specific and focused. For example, the job description for a sales person, for example, might specify the type of sales (inbound or outbound), whether the sales are are enterprise-related or more transactional (long lead time, high dollar value vs quick close and lower dollar value), and the level of the role (outbound sales rep, manager, team leader or VP).
If the candidates meet the hiring manager expectations, that’s a good sign that the job description is clearly written and specific.
The first company I started was a software distribution business. I was a one-man show the first few months.
I wrote business plans and talked to companies we would represent and resellers who would distribute the products.
After about 4 months, the business began to ramp up and I was swamped with work.
Like drinking water from a firehose.
I needed an administrative person to take care of invoicing and all the other paperwork that needed to be handled.
A person was recommended to me.
A person with relevant experience.
Only one thing.
She didn’t pass the eyeball test.
But I was desperate, and hired her anyway. 6 months later we parted ways and I hired an ace person who worked with us as we grew the distribution business to $20m in 3 years..
So - you need a job description and also a good grade on the eyeball test.
Fitting a person for your business
My rule of thumb for this is that you need a person for any job that exceeds your requirements for the job, today and for the next 3 years.
But not for a company 100x your size.
Here’s a classic example:
Startups often like to hire fancy VP Sales from a big company.
This is a mistake.
At one of our companies, we hired a senior guy from Cisco.
Terrific guy. Very good at leading sales teams and writing reports. But, we had 2 sales people.
Not regional sales managers, account executives etc.
After a year we parted ways.
Fitting the team to the task
I’d like to thank my reader tsachima2013+danny-liberman@gmail.com for reminding me how much of an anti-design pattern this can be.
There is a large graveyard of companies and teams that attempted to do things out of their league.
I’m sure you all have your own favorite examples.
One of my favorites (not my only one!) is the story of a client who was a terrible fit to their own project.
A startup was referred to me by the person in charge of innovation at a major university.
Someone that I trusted.
The 2 founders of the startup were in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. They were 2 bright, attractive, dynamic women who had raised venture capital.
After talking to them about their project, I gave them a quote.
The first red light was having a very small budget.
The second red light was their domain expertise. They had a lot of domain expertise in their field and built prototypes in their kitchens.
As it turned out - that’s all they had.
Small budgets are always a bad sign, but I reasoned that by fixing the scope of a 3 month project, we could deliver and make a small profit.
We signed a contract.
Within a week of starting the project, I realized that I had been trapped into believing appearances.
The 2 co-founders were clueless about taking their home-cooking project to a product.
We had the expertise to take their home project to the next level of a product.
They didn’t have enough money to pay us to do the work properly.
And I didn’t have the intelligence to buy out their contract and walk away.
A 3 month project dragged out to 2 years with a lot of unnecessary friction. And losing money.
DomainExpert
What is DomainExpert?
We tend to hire people who are experts in their field. In 2003, after our Fintech startup crashed, I looked for work. A friend referred me to a friend hiring for an online payments startup. The hiring manager told me that I was not a good fit for them because they were only looking for people with domain knowledge in online, mobile, prepaid payments. ( I didn’t check the mobile box ). 3 months later, I heard that the startup folded.
Not fitting their domain expertise requirement was a blessing, I guess.
Why is DomainExpert an anti-design pattern?
Let’s take a sales job for example.
Domain expertise is a siren that blinds you to whether or not they really have the skills to sell at your company.
95 times out of a 100, a rep you would buy from, that has a few years of good experience, that worked somewhere even harder, will work out.
And someone who closes and does not leave money on the table.
And they pick up the most critical domain expertise within 60 days.
Now take a programming job.
Expertise in a particular language and development environment seems like it should be important for you.
But stop right there.
How long does it take to gain proficiency in a new language and IDE? 3 months of daily work.
You’re not hiring a person for 3 months. You’re hiring someone for 3 years (at least).
Now take an administrative job. What they used to call an ‘office manager’ and before that a ‘secretary’.
All these job advertisements that require knowledge of Microsoft Office kill me.
And if you decide to use Google Docs, then what?
Solution
Let’s understand that predictors of success in any given domain are bad.
Success of learning a new domain like selling HR software is a mix of your aptitude and your learning process.
Some people believe that a natural gift is enough.
Others say that practice and systems are enough.
Both groups are wrong.
It’s impossible to predict who will be a good programmer| copy-writer|marketer | salesman | manager.
Smart people are not always good programmers. Good programmers are not always the smartest.
The measure of how smart a person is, and how well they will fit your company, the job position and the team is made up of 2 things:
Problem-solving ability
Communication skills
Problem-solving is not a generic skill. Almost all of our generic skills are far worse than domain-specific problem solving. Our generic understanding of selling something is almost irrelevant for a specific domain like HR software.
But, we can pick up the domain expertise in 30-90 days on the job with proper training.
You want smart people are with good problem solving skills, not with 12 programming languages on the resume.
Communication skills. Good software developers are good designers and good communicators.
In fact, I believe that this is true for every job on your team.
Programming jobs, support, sales, marketing, business development, finance and administration. All kinds.
How do you test communication skills in a job interview?
As the candidate 3 questions about problem solving
Provide a detailed example of what they personally contributed to solving a hard problem or how they performed in a similar situation.
How the candidate accomplished their goals
In general - What was the situation, what was the task, what actions they took, and what was the result.
The way a candidate answers the questions will give you a good understanding of their communication skills.
Not only their problem-solving skills.
Summary
We’ve seen that when you hire a person (or contract with a client) you have 3 constraints.
Fitting a person for the job
Fitting a person for your business
Fitting the team to the task
To solve the problem with these 3 constraints, you need to solve the DomainExpert anti-design pattern.
Othwerwise, you'll be putting a knife right into the heart of your business with bad hires and bad clients.