When "Being Great at Your Craft" Stops Working
You’re in a project kickoff meeting with 3 other people.
One person dives straight into the tech choices. Another worries about deadlines and dependencies. Someone else asks if the feature even matters to customers.
If you’re lucky, there’s a leader sitting quietly in the corner who manages to knit all these perspectives together.
The leader isn’t the best engineer, or the loudest planner, or the most charming in the room. They’re valuable because they can flex across four disciplines at once.
As a recent popular piece by Josh Swords framed it:
The biggest gains come from combining disciplines. There are four that show up everywhere: technical skill, product thinking, project execution, and people skills. And the more senior you get, the more you’re expected to contribute to each.
Technical skill is your chosen craft.
Product thinking is knowing what’s worth doing.
Project execution is making sure it happens.
People skills are how you work with and influence others.
Being technically skilled is not enough, and this becomes more apparent the deeper you get into your career.
I was fortunate to be drawn to the other disciplines—people, product and project—early on in my engineering career. I was terrible at staying in my lane and wanted to understand why we were building certain features, how we were going to deploy them, and how this threaded into the wider business.
It was working at these edges that allowed me to move into leadership early on and start to excel. I’m an average coder, but my value stretches far beyond that because I’ve invested a lot of time becoming fluent in the other areas.
Over the last few years, I’ve managed and coached hundreds of folks who are still over-indexing on technical skill.
I get it. Let’s be honest, there is a comfort in technical skill. It’s precise and predictable. You have a lot of control, and you can quickly bring things to life without other people getting in the way.
The other disciplines feel messy. You have to relinquish some control. You need to understand how other people will contribute. You have to cater to imperatives outside of your own.
I’ve found that a few things help:
Firstly: realise that you’re already engaging all 4 disciplines, whether you know it or not.
You engage these skills every day, whether you’re a middle manager, founder or working in a completely non-technical role, because they’re the basic skills required to turn an idea into something people can use.
Not realising this means you’re doing a lousy job of it.
Secondly, recognise that each is a skill you can improve. A lot of times I hear:
“I’m not a project manager”
“I’m not good with people”
“I’m not a product person”
But you don’t have to be a natural people-person to slowly acquire the conversational patterns and interpersonal rapport that help people trust and rally around you. You don’t have to work in Product to weigh up priorities and understand user desires.
These are trainable skills, and seeing this can make a big difference.
Thirdly, you don’t have to be great at all 4 disciplines to be a well-rounded builder. Everyone has natural strengths. But you should at least be able to translate between these different languages to get the extra support you need.
Resist calls to constantly specialise. Leaders who can thread between technical depth, product instinct, operational rigour, and human connection are the ones who get handed the messy, high-leverage problems. And builders who can translate between the 4 disciplines are the ones who are best placed to make a dent in the world with their visions.
My experience is that a conscious effort to boost your weakest discipline can result in big payoffs. No one is stopping you from taking this into your own hands.
Take inventory this week: where’s your blind spot? How would you make a dramatic improvement in this area over the next month?
p.s. Need a hand?