Experts shape the perspective from which a company operates and in this case subject area experts are likely users and hence feature and product-centric, wanting to solve the problems as they see them. It’s similar to how senior executives are perceived as experts in strategy, which gets in the way of letting a company be market-driven. However in this case the subject area experts are perceived as buyers and this gets in the way of being buyer-centric.

In many companies I’ve been at I’ve witnessed older products or services have unfortunate influence on the development, marketing and sales strategy for new enterprise products. The conceptual and cultural gravity from the expertise surrounding them greatly impeded finding and capitalizing on new opportunities.

In my post I assumed that these subject area experts were generating a buyer-centric approach, but one that was still dangerous due to the limited breadth of a few experts compared to the complexity of enterprise software markets (multiple verticals, varying size of companies, selling at different levels).

However given that buyer-centric is driven by buyer-personas, a proper persona creation process would merge the multiple market variations until comfortably addressable by a smaller and manageable set of personas.

So personas would be one part of the solution to the expert-problem, so long as companies are extremely cautious (hesitant?) about building buyer personas from internal resources, find effective means to validate those personas, and then strongly communicate those personas internally to help liberate the company from the undue influence of its own experts.