Article summary
Teams that lock into one way of working, or staff every seat to an assumed archetype, lose their ability to flex. The strongest teams I’ve been part of, at Atomic and on the client side, have had people who were deep in their own discipline and could (and would) still step outside their title when the project needed it.
That second part is the generalist streak, and recently I’ve begun to think of it as an option. Most staffing plans don’t price options at all.
What the Valuation Misses
An accounting professor of mine in grad school used acquisitions to make this point. When a company weighs buying one business over another, the valuation math covers a lot, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Part of the value is flexibility, such as being able to make another choice later for less money, or deciding faster that it’s time to enter a new market. That value is real, and it doesn’t land on the balance sheet.
Teams work the same way. Someone with range lets you make the next call cheaper and faster, without a new hire, a new vendor, or a wait for the right specialist to free up. They don’t need to be an expert in the second domain per se; they just need to be able to jump in with the perspective of a product designer, an accountant, a product owner, or an architect and ask the question or advocate as that person would.
More broadly, it can raise the utility of the whole team. I can rely on someone to engage in a discovery session even if they aren’t a researcher or a designer.
In practice too, I’ve found that it’s rarely dramatic, and oftentimes fills a gap or unblocks a team. For me, it has looked like:
- Coordinating and running a bug bash as a Product Manager, and then qualifying tickets for release akin to QA, all in support of an upcoming launch
- Advocating on behalf of a client’s design team for a process change that made the whole team work better
- Combing through a lengthy MSA looking at mechanics of a coordinated wind down
None of those were in my job description at the time. In each case, the team decided without first stopping to staff a new role.
Range on Top of Depth
This isn’t an argument against specialists. If you’re buying a software team, you want people who are excellent at the work you hired them for. Depth sets the quality bar on a problem you understand, and range gives the team options when that problem changes shape.
The most valuable people I’ve worked with have a home discipline they’re excellent in and enough range to cover a gap when one opens up. A team of pure specialists can be excellent and still stall when the work drifts outside everyone’s lane. They also know where their range ends. They bring a designer’s or an architect’s questions into the room, then go find the person who knows it cold and let that person change their mind.
To put it in soccer terms, every team would benefit from a specialist like Bruno Fernandes in the No. 10 role. But knowing you can trust Bruno on the wing, as a false 9 (the striker who drops deep to link play), or a number 8 (midfielder who can sit deeper towards the backline to orchestrate from build-up) is incredibly valuable to the team overall. A manager with that type of player has the ability to change shape/strategy mid-match without burning a valuable substitution.
Why It Matters More Now
AI makes range cheaper to build. I moonlight as a developer with my buddy Claude, building internal tools, and I’ll have a devil’s advocate agent poke holes in a proposal before it goes out. That widens what one person can take on. It doesn’t hand anyone judgment in a domain they’ve never worked in. The tools help me most when I’ve done enough of the adjacent work to spot a wrong answer, and when I still take that answer to a specialist.
Resumes show depth, but they won’t show who will step in as QA during a launch window or speak up for another discipline’s process during crunch time.
So, if I were evaluating a partner’s team, I’d ask that directly: who has stepped outside their role, and what happened when they did?