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