The age of the Product Generalist

As technology becomes increasingly abstracted, generalisation becomes more important

By this, I mean that as more and more generalised technical challenges are solved, it will become increasingly important for founders and software engineers to become generalists

We've already seen this with the emergence of 'Full Stack Engineers', which now accounts for many of the software roles that I'm seeing. The next evolution was the 'Product Engineer', who was able to code while having a strong understanding of product and contributing to determining what is being built, and the Designer/Developer archetype that I'm increasingly seeing too. Not to mention the 'Growth Engineer'

I don't think this will stop there. We're already seeing solo founders playing all of these roles simultaneously, as well as being effective at marketing, sales and growth

Of course, people who have specialised will argue that you can't become an expert in all of these, and they would be correct. But increasingly I believe that isn't going to be necessary, with expertise handled by specific solutions, unless that expertise is the core value that you're providing as a company (such as in the case of OpenAI)

For most, reduced communication debt with a smaller team will be substantially better than any gains derived from experts in-house