Customers & Research

I'm a domain expert building for my own industry. Does knowing the field too well make me worse at spotting the real job?

A starting point

It can, because expertise makes you assume you already know the answer and skip the listening. The trap is confusing your job (what you struggled with) with your customers' job (what they struggle with), and those diverge more than experts expect. As a starting point, treat your expertise as a source of sharp hypotheses to test, not conclusions to build on.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Listen Read

Listen

🎧 Podcast
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Why we picked it Bob Moesta helped build the JTBD framework, and this is the most practical, founder-facing conversation on it available for free. The episode has a whole segment called the danger of looking at the customer through the product, which is precisely the trap a domain expert falls into. It moves from theory to the actual interviewing craft, so you leave with something to do, not just a concept.

The Ultimate Guide to JTBD (Bob Moesta, co-creator of the framework)

On Lenny's Podcast by Lenny Rachitsky (host), Bob Moesta (guest) ~90 min

  • The core mistake builders make is reasoning from their product outward instead of from the customer's struggling moment inward, which is worse when you know the domain too well.
  • Interview for the moment of switch (what pushed and pulled someone to change), because that is where the real job hides, not in what customers say they want.
  • Understanding the context behind a pain point beats knowing the technical details of the field, which levels the ground between insiders and outsiders.
Open lennysnewsletter.com →

Read

✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This piece names the exact bias behind the question: once you know a field cold, your brain literally cannot simulate not knowing it, so you assume the customer shares your context. It is written for practitioners, not academics, and ties the bias straight to product, onboarding, and communication decisions. A useful starting point for a domain expert who suspects their own fluency is hiding the real job.

The Curse of Knowledge at Work: Why Experts Can No Longer Explain Things Simply

From SUE Behavioural Design by Astrid Groenewegen ~15 min read

  • The curse of knowledge is structural, not a willpower problem: telling an expert to just explain more simply does not work, so you need outside reviewers and fresh eyes built into your process.
  • Deep expertise makes you overestimate what customers already understand, which is the same mechanism that makes you misread which job they are actually hiring you for.
  • Concrete fix: put recent newcomers (or non-expert customers) in the room before you lock in a product decision, because they still remember what confusion feels like.
Open suebehaviouraldesign.com →
📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Intermediate

Why we picked it When you feel that something is broken but cannot name it, Christensen's Jobs-to-be-Done lens gives you a way to describe the actual progress a person is trying to make in a specific situation. That reframing turns a fuzzy hunch into a concrete job you can go test with real people, which is exactly the move from vague to sharp. It is the canonical text on the idea, and it is a starting point for thinking in jobs, not a formula to follow blindly.

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

From HarperBusiness by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan ~288 pages

  • People do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance, so define the job, not the demographic.
  • A job has functional, social, and emotional dimensions, which is often where the real, unmet problem is hiding.
  • Once you can state the job clearly, you have a testable claim you can validate or kill by talking to the people who have it.
Open amazon.com →

People also ask

What does 'jobs to be done' actually mean? People don't buy products, they 'hire' them to make progress in a specific situation, the famous milkshake was hired to make a boring commute beara... Beginner 2 resources → How is JTBD different from features, personas, or user needs? Personas describe who; JTBD describes the progress they're trying to make and the struggle that pushes them to switch. Features are your answer; th... Intermediate 2 resources → How do I actually uncover the job my customers are hiring my product for? Interview people who recently switched to or bought something in your space and reconstruct the timeline: what triggered the search, what they used... Intermediate 3 resources → Who are my real competitors once I think in jobs to be done? Anything the customer currently 'hires' to get the same job done, including a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a competitor, or doing nothing at all.... Intermediate 3 resources → How do I turn a job to be done into product and messaging decisions? Write the job as a struggling-moment statement ('when I ___, I want to ___, so I can ___') and use it as the filter for what to build and how to pi... Advanced 2 resources → How many customer interviews do I need before I trust the job I've found is real? There's no magic number, but the honest signal is repetition: when your last three interviews stop surprising you and start confirming the same str... Intermediate 3 resources →