Why T-shaped people?. A T-shaped person is capable in many… | by Jason Yip | Medium
As opposed to an expert in one thing (I-shaped) or a “jack of all trades, master of none” generalist, a “t-shaped person” is an expert in at least one thing but also somewhat capable in many other things. Alternate phrases for “t-shaped” include, “multi-skilled”, “generalizing specialist”, “icicle-shaped”, “paint drip”, and “broken comb”. Product delivery teams get asked to do a lot of different things, each of which require different skillsets. We have two general ways to respond to this. The first is to adjust what gets scheduled to balance against what we can handle, aka demand-leveling. The second approach is to make our response more adaptable through T-shaped people. Let’s imagine we have an incomplete task that is blocking overall progress due to dependencies. In this case, the best person to work on the blocking task is the person who can complete it the fastest. The word we assign to people who can complete a particular type of task the fastest is “expert”. Experts are most va
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