You Don't Need an Advisor Who Knows Your Industry

I've tripled a team's productivity about ten times in the last decade, across different teams, companies and industries. I'm not an expert in any of those industries, and I've walked into some of them knowing nothing at all. There's an honest condition on that number: it's every engagement where the company was open to help with its process, its communication and its leadership.

That's a common objection when a founder is deciding whether to bring me in: do you know our industry? It's a fair question. If you're about to spend real money on outside help, you want someone who understands your world, and the conventional wisdom says the person helping you should know it better than anyone. Job descriptions say the same thing about leaders. If the team needs five years of experience, the manager needs ten.

I don't think that's right. Deep domain expertise is helpful. It isn't what fixes a team that's stuck.

What actually moves a stuck team

When I triple a team's output, it isn't because I know their domain better than they do. I don't. I rely on them for that. What changes the outcome is a different set of skills: setting a direction, seeing the systems the team is caught in, understanding how people make meaning of the same events, having the honest conversations nobody else wants to have, and protecting the people doing the work.

My job is to build a great team, point them in the right direction, keep them pointed there, and make sure nothing gets in their way. None of that requires knowing more about crypto news, career platforms or health insurance than the people who've spent years inside them.

It also changes what you need from yourself as the leader. I've been leading teams for more than twenty years, and one of the rules I lead by is to give the credit and take the blame. If part of your job is giving the team credit, you don't need to have all the answers. You set the direction and keep everyone aligned to it, and the how, along with the specialized knowledge it takes, belongs to the people doing the work. A leader who needs to be the smartest specialist in the room ends up competing with their own team instead of clearing the way for it.

The reason this works across so many different companies is simple: I don't have depth on any one industry, but humans are humans everywhere. The same communication problems show up, the same leadership skills are needed, and the same kinds of systems trap the same kinds of capable people. A team that's shipping late at a media company and a team that's shipping late at an ed-tech company are usually late for reasons that rhyme.

The research on outsiders

There's good evidence that distance from a field can help solve its problems. Lars Bo Jeppesen and Karim Lakhani studied 166 science challenges posted on InnoCentive by the R&D labs of large companies and solved by more than 12,000 outside scientists. The further a solver's own expertise was from the field the problem came from, the more likely they were to produce the winning solution. People outside the field brought perspectives and methods the insiders didn't have.

The same pattern shows up at the top of companies. Research on S&P 1500 firms by Cláudia Custódio, Miguel Ferreira and Pedro Matos found that CEOs with broader careers – more positions, more firms, more industries – led companies that produced more patents, and more-cited ones. A one-standard-deviation increase in their measure of general managerial ability went with 7% to 19% more patents. Their explanation is that generalists bring knowledge from outside the firm's current domain and are more willing to take on risky, exploratory work.

Neither study is about product advisors, and I'd be overreaching to claim they prove my point. They do show that "you have to come from here to help here" isn't a law of nature.

The evidence that competence matters

There's also research that cuts the other way, and it's worth taking seriously. Benjamin Artz, Amanda Goodall and Andrew Oswald found that a boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of an employee's job satisfaction. The measures they used included whether the supervisor worked their way up inside the company and whether they could do the employee's job if the employee were away.

I don't think that contradicts the case for outsiders, but it sharpens it. What the research rewards is competence in the craft of the work, and that's exactly what a good advisor should bring. The craft I bring is product and leadership: how teams decide what to build, how work flows, where it gets stuck, and how the people doing it are treated. That's the part where I could step in and do the work myself. The domain – the regulations, the customers' vocabulary, the technical history of your platform – is the part your team already holds, and my job is to draw it out of them, not to pretend I got there first.

So the question isn't whether an advisor knows your industry. It's whether they know the craft you're hiring them for, deeply enough that your team would trust them to do it.

When the domain gap is real

Sometimes the gap matters, and a good outsider should say so instead of waving it away. When Tallo needed requirements for student privacy, I didn't know FERPA either, so I spent four weeks reading it before designing anything. Not knowing the domain is a reason to do the reading and to lean on the people who already know it. It isn't a reason to stay out.

The same goes for leading a team where people know more than you do. The conventional advice treats that as a problem, and it produces a lot of impostor syndrome in new leaders who get promoted past their own specialty. I'd frame it the other way. Domain mastery and leadership are different skill sets. If someone on your team knows more than you about the work, that isn't proof you're a fraud. You're doing a different job.

How to judge an advisor who doesn't know your world

If you're weighing outside help and the industry question is nagging at you, there are better questions to ask than "have you worked in our space?"

Ask how they'd learn what they don't know, and who on your team they'd rely on for it. Ask what they'd look at first, and listen for whether the answer is about your people and how the work moves or about a framework they bring to every client. Ask about a time they worked somewhere unfamiliar and what they got wrong at first. An advisor who's comfortable saying "I'd need your team for that part" is usually one who'll get you further than one who claims to know everything already.

None of those questions require them to have worked in your industry, and all of them tell you more than a list of past clients in your space would.

The industry is the context. The skill you're paying for is helping the people who know that context do their best work in it.