^{Published in Product Coalition}

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…

Being A Professional Multipotentialite / Creative Polymath

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.