Curiosity scales better than expertise
I’ve spent most of my career selling professional services — marketing, development, product strategy — to just about every kind of client you can imagine. Startups, entrepreneurs, mid-size businesses, large enterprises, even a few government agencies.
When you’re in that world, there’s a familiar pattern in how people evaluate you. They want to know three things:
Have you done this before?
Have you done it for someone like them?
Were you successful?
The second one — “Have you done it for someone like me?” — is where I push back.
There’s a persistent idea that the best product, marketing, or creative work comes from specialists: people who have spent a decade inside one niche. Financial services. Real estate. Insurance tech. And sure, sector knowledge can be useful. But it’s rarely what moves the needle.
What actually creates better products is diversity of experience.
Over the years, I’ve worked in everything from fintech to social apps to food pantry distribution. That range doesn’t dilute my expertise, rather it sharpens it. Lessons learned while designing an app for low-connectivity areas translate beautifully into how a financial platform should degrade gracefully when data is slow. It’s not about the vertical; it’s about understanding patterns, users, and the constraints that shape behavior.
When I build teams, I don’t look for people who’ve only done one thing. I look for people who’ve done a little of everything and people who know how to learn fast, adapt to new industries, and bring lessons from one world into another. Those are the hires who build the most innovative work.
Deep expertise matters in highly regulated spaces. But for most teams, too much specialization is an impediment, not an advantage. You can teach someone the industry. You can’t teach them curiosity, empathy, or the ability to connect dots across domains.
Diversity of experience will always make the best products. Always.