I have always enjoyed the Aytekin Tank article entitled “The era of the specialist is over”. If you haven’t read it then I encourage you to do so, (after reading my blog of course).His strapline is that he believes “Becoming a deep generalist who excels in multiple fields can increase your income, opportunities, and entrepreneurial success”. This made me reflect on my own situation as I felt immediately that this resonated with me and my current situation as well as my aspirations. Through my childhood I always pushed for social activities and found my comfort zones through sports, all sports.
I soon found that I was quite unique in this nature, whilst many of my peers “dabbled” in other activities, their focus was largely drawn to the one speciality. Now don’t get me wrong, they were good and would often beat me if we were competing more times that not, however I was growing. Socially, physically and mentally I was always competing, my network was expanding and my fitness was improving. Through my willingness to engage in a broader spectrum of activities, I was, by default improving in all aspects and it wasn’t long before I was out performing my peers in their specialist subjects.
I compare this narrative to my professional career, I was never a master of one subject, but I competed well at all levels. Being fortunate enough to work for a wide variety of tech companies in my career has naturally fostered my desire to engage. Its is no surprise therefore that I identify professionally as a product manager, a role that is often described by many as having a need to “wear many hats” in order to be successful. What this refers to is the concept of being able to view your products from a legal, compliance, marketing etc perspective in order to make the right priority choices in pushing your product forward down the roadmap of success. In my experience this much is always true, but so is the idea of Product Managers making good Scrum Masters, Project Managers or UI designers. Now this model isn’t without its perils, Agile thrives on the healthy challenges between all parties in order to make a better product and in organisations with large headcount, this relationship can be critical and the nature of the project portfolio simply does not allow for a single individual to manage the workload. Consider however, a startup, a mature organisation with outsourced technology or a “tech second” organisation with a legacy system, without the financials or perhaps the desire to invest in a fully fledged all bells and whistles agile squad. How do they access the resource to support, progress and enhance their technology in order to serve the needs of a shifting customer base. For many it simply isn’t feasible to entertain the time or money it takes to get this team in place, enter the “Happy Hybrid”.
Happy Hybrids are the buzzwords you see on every job description, “Pro Active”, “Resilient”, “Entrepreneurial”, “willing to roll up their sleeves” but ultimately they deliver, you will never hear the words “Not My Job”. I have both been and have worked with some great hybrids, they have a passion for the end goal and have always boosted the environment that they operate in both from a motivational and productivity basis. The economic benefits are obvious however the wider benefits to culture should not be underestimated. There is of course a time and place for these individuals and it ultimately depends on the overall goals of the organisation, in a Product/Project Manager scenario for example, companies will have to accept that quality of the ceremonies and sprint burn down charts may be hindered due to a need to focus on the definition of the problem being solved and the output of the delivery. Some people reading this will be thinking “well thats just preposterous, “you cannot achieve quality and change without disciplined agile practices” and in many cases I agree, however I have seen many successful deliveries without all the agile fluff in place and it operates extremely well.
I am a product of agile culture as my whole career has been surrounded by its notions, principles and rituals, however there is a spectrum to adoption which I believe shares correlation with the size and maturity of an organisation i.e. the greater the size, headcount, revenue the greater the level of adoption needed, therefore there is an expiry date for applied hybrids where they become less effective. The result meaning responsibilities are distributed as the need for a team cannot be ignored.
