How to Become a Domain Expert
When companies tighten budgets, they make hard choices about who stays and who goes. The engineers who are the hardest to replace are the ones with deep, irreplaceable knowledge.
If you understand a critical part of the application better than anyone else, you become essential. Your work makes the team faster, the product stronger, and your role more secure.
This week, I'll show you how to build that kind of expertise, become a leader on your team, and give yourself a level of job security that generic skills can't match.
What Does It Mean to "Own" a Domain?
Domain ownership means becoming the primary expert in a specific system, technology, or feature within your product. It involves thoroughly understanding the domain, proactively solving complex issues, enhancing documentation, improving test coverage, and overseeing the entire system lifecycle.
By owning a domain, you shift from reacting to problems to shaping how that area evolves. To ensure your work truly adds value, revisit my article on When Is Your Work Actually Complete?
Steps to Becoming a Domain Expert
Here's how you can quickly build and demonstrate deep domain expertise:
- Maintain Up-to-Date Documentation: Regularly update and expand documentation, making it clear and accessible.
- Create Comprehensive Architecture Diagrams: Visualize system interactions to deepen your understanding of how everything connects.
- Tackle Domain-Specific Bugs: Make sure to volunteer to resolve issues in your chosen domain.
- Increase Test Coverage: Develop robust tests that clearly outline expectations and ensure system reliability.
- Refactor Legacy Code: Simplify and clarify existing code to uncover hidden dependencies and improve maintainability.
To align these steps with broader product goals, take a look at How to Develop a Product Mindset.
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Benefits of Owning Your Domain
Domain expertise offers substantial advantages for your career and your team:
- Career Protection and Growth: Elevates your visibility, increases your influence in decisions, leads to better performance reviews, and strengthens your job security.
- Enhanced Team Efficiency: Clear domain ownership can reduce software defects by as much as sixfold, facilitating quicker issue resolution and increased productivity.
A 2015 study on code ownership & quality found that files with clear ownership had six times fewer defects, reinforcing how strong code ownership directly improves software quality.
Example Domains You Can Own
It can be challenging to determine what makes sense to own, as every company is unique. Here are some common systems most technology teams work with to give you a few options to look at:
- Billing & Payments
- Authentication & Authorization
- Data Pipelines & Analytics
- Observability & Monitoring
- Frontend State Management
- Infrastructure & DevOps
Choosing a domain aligned with your interests and vital to your company ensures that your expertise remains highly relevant.
Challenges for Domain Ownership
While domain ownership can significantly benefit your career, avoid these common mistakes:
- Creating Knowledge Silos: Ensure your knowledge is documented and accessible to teammates.
- Resistance to Sharing Expertise: Foster a culture of collaboration, mentorship, and sharing of expertise.
- Burnout from Constant Firefighting: Manage your workload and delegate tasks to ensure you are not the sole person responsible.
To build a team environment that encourages positive interactions and collaboration, refer back to my article, Are You Creating Lift or Drag?
Becoming the domain expert on your team strengthens your career, builds your influence, and helps protect you from layoffs.
If you have experiences or questions about domain expertise, I'd love to connect and hear your thoughts.