Generalista Definition
What Is a Generalista?
A Generalista is not someone who is average at everything. A Generalista combines deep expertise in their core craft with strategic competence in 3-5 adjacent domains. This isn't about being mediocre at everything. It's about strategic breadth that amplifies your deep expertise, and the practical ability to build new skills while keeping your day job.
Everyone becomes a generalista, but not the same kind of generalista. Designers who code still think like designers. PMs who prototype still think like PMs. Engineers who design still think like engineers. That diversity of perspective applied to shared capabilities is what multiplies organizational creativity.
At Uber, I watched simple features take three months from research to ship, not because the work was complex but because translation loss happened at every handoff. Research would finish studies and hand off insights, designers would translate those into mockups, PMs wrote specs, engineers built. By the time we shipped, the original insight had been filtered through so many interpretations that we often missed what mattered.
What changed in the last two years is that AI eliminated the technical barriers. A designer waiting for analytics to run a SQL query can now write that query themselves with Claude's help in ten minutes. A PM stuck until engineering builds a prototype can spin one up with Cursor. A researcher who can't pull metrics without data access can build dashboards with AI assistance. Not at expert level. At good enough to unblock yourself level.
The Generalista framework is practical: you learn what the work demands, when it demands it, while shipping real results. You don't go back to school or quit your job. The barrier isn't technical anymore. It's psychological.
The Three Forces Reshaping Knowledge Work
1. Democratization of Specialization
Your methodology is in a Medium article, your framework is a Figjam template, your expertise can be explained by ChatGPT in 30 seconds. Expert knowledge is being codified into frameworks, templates, and AI tools. At LinkedIn, I learned that gatekeeping was not the path to growing our research practice. The most powerful insights came not from reports sitting in someone's hard drive but from bringing people along to hear, see, and touch the data directly.
2. AI Empowering Novices
The gap between novice and expert is collapsing. PMs writing code with Claude, designers art-directing with Midjourney, researchers analyzing at scale with AI. What remains valuable is not execution speed, but the judgment about what's worth building and the context to direct AI effectively. As AI commoditizes execution, context becomes the new moat.
3. Role Consolidation
580,000+ tech positions eliminated 2022-2024, many roles never returned. Companies are consolidating functions into whoever can execute fastest, not whoever holds the title. Role consolidation is moving in three directions: your work gets absorbed by adjacent roles, their work flows into yours, or the role stops existing. The signal isn't in your title anymore. It's in what you can actually execute on.
Generalista vs Specialist
Specialists are essential for depth. Generalistas add leverage by bridging boundaries. The strongest teams have both. T-shaped professionals expand within their function. Generalistas expand across functions.
Read the full comparison →Find Your Starting Point
Take the free assessment to identify your current archetype and next capabilities.