I keep seeing job ads looking for some dream designer who has experience and knowledge of their particular niche and think that their perfect designer soulmate is out there somewhere.
The designer soulmate is out there, but they probably have no experience in your field. A good design relationship is about people, not products, fields, or niches.
A good designer is a good communicator
To be a good designer you need to be adaptable and able to quickly learn what you need to know about any particular field your client is working in.
You need to be a good communicator and able to extract the information you need out of people.
You then need to be able to process that knowledge, learn from it, and apply it to the project.
The client should be the expert
A designer only needs the client to know their field, and then be able to extract what they need to know from the client's expert knowledge. Good design is teamwork. No good designer will make great work in a bubble.
When I start working on a new project, the first thing I do is immerse myself in the field that my client is in. I learn everything I can about the field, their goals, their problems, competitors, and generally ask a lot of "stupid" questions.
Stupid questions
It's key to ask a lot of questions, some might call them stupid questions because often they might seem obvious, but I've learned a lot by asking a question I thought I already knew the answer to. More often than not, I learn things are not actually quite how they seemed, and I learn some key point that will help me produce great work.
A fresh perspective
I believe a fresh perspective is always positive. Not being already knowledgeable in a field allows you to question a lot of the assumptions the experts have made. Questioning why something is the way it is is always positive. It can make the difference between a great product and a product that is no different from all the other products.
Being already an expert in a field can be detrimental to your work, as you might already have too much knowledge that might not directly apply to what your new client is doing.
That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing to be experienced in a field, as long as you ask all those stupid questions again, you should be fine.