I started my career by embracing the label of the ‘Swiss Army Knife’. As a Producer and UX Lead at a scaling startup, I valued the ability to jump from wire-framing to front-end QA, or from sprint planning to pitch deck copy. It felt entrepreneurial; it felt efficient. It was, after all, the only way to survive in a lean, fast-moving environment.
However, I have now realised this multi-disciplinary mindset, while essential for a company’s foundation, rapidly becomes an efficiency trap as soon as you begin to scale. The temptation to rely on the generalist is strong because they provide immediate coverage for a problem, but they rarely provide the definitive solution. The choice is stark: do we seek speed, or do we seek quality and leverage? For a Product Leader focused on long-term value, the answer must be the latter.
The hidden cost of context switching
The belief that one person can simultaneously analyse a user flow, organise the data layer, and write compelling copy is an illusion of efficiency. What we are actually doing is paying a severe cost in cognitive load and context switching.
Every time my UX Lead stops focusing on interaction design to manually adjust front-end styling, a five-minute task quickly bleeds into a twenty-minute interruption. Their deep focus on the user’s journey is broken, and it takes time to spool that expertise back up. Multiply this across an entire team of well-meaning generalists, and you quickly generate an environment where deep work is impossible and delivery is perpetually ‘good enough’.
The startup ecosystem in 2017 is demanding specialisation. The technology stack is too complex, the user expectations for polish are too high, and the competition is too fierce for ‘good enough’ to be sustainable. My role now is to guard the focus of my team; to ensure that the individual who is best placed to deliver a component is the one focusing on it exclusively, without the distraction of a secondary, tertiary, or even quaternary skill set.
Strategic constraint enables deep work
Specialisation is an act of strategic constraint. It is the decision to consciously narrow the scope of one’s professional remit to achieve a level of mastery that is simply unavailable to a generalist. This is not about knowing less; it is about executing with greater depth and precision.
I have found personal constraint to be a powerful driver of productivity. Earlier this year, I implemented a personal challenge: for my work soundtrack, I chose to listen exclusively to a single artist’s complete catalogue. This might sound trivial, but the constraint had a profound, unexpected effect. By removing the constant cognitive friction of choosing, curating, and assessing new music, I freed up mental resources that I could then immediately dedicate to my actual work. The friction of choice disappeared, and the efficiency of my creative process soared.
The professional lesson is clear: remove the option to do three jobs poorly, and you force the person to do one job flawlessly. My goal is to organise the product team around T-shaped individuals: those with one deep specialism, bordered by a broad, complementary understanding of the product landscape. It is this single, deep skill that drives true value, allowing us to build products with the necessary precision to thrive at scale.
The path to specialisation is leverage
We must stop romanticising the multi-disciplinary generalist as the ultimate symbol of entrepreneurship. They are necessary at the zero-to-one stage, but they are a brake on progress from one-to-one hundred. My focus, and the advice I offer to any scaling leader, is to look past the immediate time-saving of a versatile employee and invest instead in the long-term leverage of a specialist. Strategic constraint, in both personal challenges and professional roles, is the only path to a sustainable, high-quality, and efficient product organisation.