If you’re a startup with limited funds, then you have no choice but to hire generalists. Employees who wear many hats can produce a minimally viable product faster and more cheaply. And a smaller team means a nimbler team, which takes less time to make decisions.
The downside, of course, is that rarely will someone be an excellent engineer, product person and CEO all rolled in one. Rarely is someone a great saleswoman, marketer, and financial analyst. And even more rarely is someone a great UX designer, writer, visual designer, and researcher. Everyone has a finite number of strengths, and that means that your startup will suffer from a lack of talent in the areas in which your team is weak.
Fast-forward a bit, to when your company has grown to the point at which you can start hiring for specialized positions. You can bring in the top players in all the essential disciplines and start filling out the areas in which you’ve been weak. From a hiring perspective, things get a bit easier: you know exactly what you need. However, the startup world still tends to attract players who can play multiple positions. It rarely attracts star single-position players. You may still find yourself interviewing generalists—some of whom are very talented—but the organization you’ve now created mostly needs specialists. If you hire a generalist for a specialist position, he or she is likely to feel underutilized and start branching out of the space you’ve carved out for them.
This is natural, and I’ve seen it happen on the teams that I’ve hired in the UX space. When the team is small, a company hires designer/developers or interaction/visual design hybrids. As the team grows, individual positions for each of those areas are created, but the generalists still apply. And they’re talented folks, but as they stretch their wings they begin to smack specialists in the face. From the perspective of a generalist, she’s just doing her job. From the manager’s perspective, though, you’ve got a potential problem with feelings of redundancy and wasted efficiency throughout the team.
My philosophy is to never to underutilize a skill set. I do, however, have clear job descriptions that lay out the responsibilities and requirements for a particular position. I hire based explicitly on those job descriptions. Once employees are acclimated to the roles they were hired for, then work beyond the scope of that role magically finds its way to the folks who can get it done. So while employees’ job titles and the bulk of their day-to-day workload is specialized, their additional skills do get a workout beyond that specialization over time. Such a setup may not be ideal, but if it gets good people into your organization and keeps them happy, it helps to dull the double-edged blade of specialization.
