How we conduct business, analyze the market for strategic value, and ultimately, how companies hire specific sets of skills is shifting in the growing field of digital product engineering. It’s been happening for a while now, but the mainstream market is starting to get the hint. Digital product engineering is reframing how businesses think about technology, innovation, and revenue streams. The need to understand a variety of different subject matters, industries/markets, and real-world perspectives from multiple angles, like user/engineer/consumer/stakeholder/etc., reinforces the need for a highly-skilled, objectively nimble, and creatively strong generalist who we can think of as a Fusionist!

If you know the frustrations and undervalued experiences that have plagued generalists in the past, jump ahead to What Encourages My Inner Generalist! If you’re curious about my experience and why I’m so excited about this moment in our professional evolution, continue reading…

For most of my life, I thought of myself as a jack-of-all-trades type of person and a master of none. You might think of this as a generalist. I now consider myself to have more of a polymath pre-disposition or a multipotentialite. Which is someone who has a deep curiosity in a very broad range of interests and can dive deep into any of them, grasps the core concepts, but often does not stick around to specialize in it. They’d prefer to learn about an entirely separate topic, thus becoming a generalist and eventually a Fusionist, which I describe later.

In my experience, generalists can easily be overlooked or severely undervalued, often with the assumption that “you just don’t fit the profile of what we need” or, more frustratingly, “I need the best person for the job, and I don’t see the one thing I need on your resume.” Hiring requirements often disregard the skill sets tangent to the shortlist of needs they specify, missing the opportunity to hire the right person with a rounded set of quality skills that equate to the same thing.

Early in my career, this presented a dilemma. As a multipotentialite, I deep-dive into wildly different subject matters, making it tough to describe what I do cohesively or, more specifically, the value I can provide. I think that is why I’m writing this article: to help comfort or guide anyone else struggling with experiencing or feeling similar. If so, please comment or reach out if this resonates with you. Here’s a bit of what I’m talking about.

The various skills I have crafted over the last 35+ total years provide expertise in many disciplines like systems & design thinking, computational design, architecture, UI/UX design, design research, applied sciences, material science, applied behavioral science, development & delivery workflows, and product engineering to name a few. Some of those skills seem unrelated to each other except for me in the middle of them, but that is a bit of the beauty! In that perspective, I’ve recently considered myself a creative polymath, where I’m effectively a subject matter expert in a broad range of creative ways to solve problems.

To summarize the value of these disparate subject matters, here’s where I’ve landed over the years.

I have sincere interests/obsessions in many different fields of work and quickly gain knowledge around a topic to make a meaningful contribution. Often, my contribution is discernment or understanding of how things fit together, allowing me to navigate vagueness and generate actionable clarity for what to do next, create a strategy for the future, or provide more perspective on how an event or product might affect other systems connected to it.

So, while I have a set of skills that could easily do the job, as a professional, it feels like my only hope is to become so amazing at the multiple things I can do that eventually, someone realizes the one thing they need I can provide. That can take a long time if you jump from one subject to another. Hence, in my early career dilemma, I knew a lot, but not quite the one thing or the proficiency of the one thing well enough for someone to pay a premium.

Lately, the ability to navigate and clarify vagueness is becoming increasingly valuable among high-paying professional positions, which is very encouraging.

Here are the top three things I recently encountered and one harsh truth that I need to accept before I can find success that encourages me about my polymath predisposition.

When I was younger, it never felt like I fit in anywhere, and yet it seemed like I fit everywhere. Adaptation has become my strongest attribute. However, the world is still run by other people who must know how to value you! The greatest path to promotion or winning over a client is painfully clear value to that individual’s need. If they have a pain point, it must become obvious that you will fix it. That will never go away.

So, to become a recognized and accomplished Fusionist, you have to start with a single expertise that results in a big win, which will cause people to take notice and understand exactly where you fit. What typically follows is a cognitive trick humans leverage without even realizing it called the Halo Bias.

The Halo Bias is effectively someone’s glorified perspective of you and what you can accomplish. It’s a bit like falling in love, but professionally. It basically says, “If you're amazing at this, you must be amazing at everything else!” It’s how we gain influence with others we’ve never met, gain recognition as a brand for being the best, and become seen as viable candidates for a major promotion.

Now, all I need to figure out is what one thing I will get behind and make a big splash. The hard part is culling down my list and sticking with something long enough to build up momentum to even have the chance at making a splash, let alone a big one. I’m still figuring that out, but things are moving in the right direction. So wish me luck!