The Blank Page Start to Domain Expertise

When building up the domain knowledge we need to start somewhere. Starting fresh can be scary - but it is also liberating. Your goal here is not to find a problem worth solving or paving our way to the solution. You’re trying to understand what is interesting and important for your product, so you can build a baseline of information. It’s a great way to step back from past beliefs and jump into a beginner's mind. It’s easy to get lost in the breadth of information. The following approach should help you build up your domain expertise journey and get started.

When we build up domain expertise, we get a mental model, a general understanding of the world with all the benefits I talked about in my last post

A Fresh Start

We should put two questions into the back of our minds:

• „What is interesting about [domain], and why?“

• „What do we need to know about [domain]?“

These questions help you spot blind spots, pick up the domain language, get a clear mental model, and come along with tons of facts.

I like to start broad and narrow things down.

First, I pick big categories to explore e.g.

• Customer

• Users

• Market

• Competition

• Partners/Suppliers/Vendors

• Regulations/Compliance/Legals

• Acquisition

• Technology

• Business Model

• Operations

The list might differ to your setup but they are a great starting point. But we need a full blend of things from the outside (like users/customer) and the inside of the company (financial model)

Knowing what to Extract

Then I note down all the information that I can imagine to be relevant for each category. Once you’ve got your list, decide exactly what you need to know from each area.

e.g. I can uncover needs, journeys, or behaviors from the customer domain

Or I can uncover features and USPs from the competitor domain, but I might not be interested in the pricing at that moment.\

For this, I like to use the product map as a mental model for the taxonomies to look for. Here is the list of the most common ones.

• Segmentation

• Market Trends

• User Needs

• Product Usage

• User Journey

• Bugs

• User Behavior

• Features

• Messaging

• Company Financials

• USPs

• Technical Capabilities

• Problem

• Marketing Channels

• Limitations

• Product margins

• Pricing
  
  
  Here is an example of how this looks like in practice
  
  
  

  

  
  
  

It serves two purposes:

• It helps me think about what I don’t have on top of my mind

• I can scope my research activities to not end up in endless research without having a defined end.

Avoiding Workload Paralysis

The type of information we want to get from each domain might duplicate. E.g. I might gonna list the features of a competitor and get the features from our product. Gathering the same info from multiple sources connects the dots. It clarifies what’s important. It creates a contrast that helps us find meaning in the information we get.

Now I can take this and start to define dedicated questions I want to get answered on a very high level. This is about getting it all out of your head and writing it down. Something like: What are the legal restrictions? What is the most relevant feature my customers love? …

These steps help to get the abstract concepts down to earth. One of the struggles you might encounter is to manage a big list of possibilities. We want to avoid workload paralysis.

The first thing here is to understand that there is a connection between the domain information you can extract. So you can start talking to customers but it’s gonna be way more powerful if you get your customer segmentation first. These connections also go both ways. That means that you can also extract the customer segments from conversations with your customers. A classic chicken/egg problem. To overcome this, just get started somewhere things will settle. You’ll come back to the domains multiple times. Trust your common sense.

In general, there are more high-level domains and information to extract, and the ones that depend on each other. Start with the ones with the least connections.

There is also a different, simple but powerful approach to prioritizing your activities. My approach is to ask „What is the answer to a question that makes all the other questions irrelevant?“ This quickly cuts through confusion and shows you the most important things to focus on.

Closing Thought

Finally, be realistic. You don’t need perfect information. Insights are fuzzy anyway, and that’s okay. Just understand how much you can trust what you find.

Make it practical, and keep it fun. Need competitor insights? Their website is obvious but also check their PR or marketing. Feeling bold? Pretend you’re a customer and see how they sell to you. This is a creative and fun exercise to explore where and how to get the best possible information. Keep the feasibility and cost of execution in mind.

Getting started is better than trying to do it all at once. The early "Aha!" moments are exciting. And if possible, bring a teammate along. Sharing insights keeps you honest and makes the whole thing easier—and more fun.