How to become a subject matter expert

It’s a pretty cool feeling when you speak at an event or get invited to be a guest on a webinar as a subject matter expert, isn’t it? But beyond the ego boost, why should you care about being a subject matter expert? As a product manager, you need to understand your product and everything around it to be successful at your job. This spans the minutiae of how your product is designed and architected to the broader market dynamics, competitive landscape, and market needs. So, how do you go about actually becoming a subject matter expert? In this guide, I’ll share six tips to help you build up subject matter expertise, pulled directly from my personal experience as the first product manager at three startups in three different markets:

Take copious notes and do research on your own time
Treat customers as subject matter experts you can learn from
Attend conferences, but not just any conference
Don’t discount online courses and textbooks
Research competitors, especially ones that failed
Get your hands dirty

Becoming an SME is daunting, but doable

When you first start a new job at a new company, becoming a subject matter expert in a new space might seem impossible. Believe me, I get it. When I started my first product management role, I actually started out as a product marketer because the team was worried that I didn’t have the depth of technical knowledge needed to be effective as a product manager. This was totally fair; I had come from a finance and venture capital background and had never really gotten hands-on in building real products. I distinctly remember joining my first team meeting and understanding perhaps 20 percent of what was said. Acronyms were being thrown around — I had no idea that GC stood for garbage collection, for instance — and I was completely and hopelessly lost. It didn’t help that I was working at a deeply technical startup, an open source database company. Despite my horrific first day, by the end of my stint at this first company, I was able to leverage my “subject matter expertise” to transition into another open source database company startup, where I ended up delivering many conference and meetup talks.

6 tips to become a subject matter expert

If someone with an economics major and no prior experience in databases can get to the point of delivering talks about, well, databases, I assure you, you can build up subject matter expertise in your area of focus as well.