The T-Shaped Myth
For years, the industry obsessed over the T-shaped professional. Deep expertise in one thing (the vertical bar), shallow competency across many others (the horizontal bar). It made sense. It was measurable. You could hire for it, evaluate it, put it on a résumé.
I spent five years trying to be one. UX design as my core, with sprints into front-end development, product strategy, and research. I thought that made me valuable. What it actually made me was shallow across the horizontals and increasingly anxious about whether my vertical bar was deep enough. I wasn't sure this was the right framework, but I kept pushing because everyone else was.
- The T-shape assumes specialization still matters in the way it did in 2012
- It creates a false binary between "designer" and "engineer" when most actual problems require both thinking simultaneously, which is harder than it sounds and I'm still figuring out how to do it well
What I'm Actually Building Now
The polymath architect is different. Not because it's trendy. Because the work demands it.
When I was building a conversational AI tool last year, I couldn't separate the interaction design from the backend logic. The way the model's context window worked wasn't a technical detail to be handed off—it shaped every decision about how users experienced the product. A designer who didn't understand that limitation would have designed something impossible. An engineer who didn't feel the UX friction would have optimized for the wrong variables.
That's not T-shaped thinking. That's thinking like the product is one organism, and your job is understanding how all the organs talk to each other. Sometimes you're working in Figma. Sometimes you're debugging why a prompt isn't returning what you expected. Sometimes you're in a spreadsheet trying to figure out the financial model. Not because you're an expert in any of those—I'm not—but because the problem doesn't respect your discipline boundaries.
The difference is fundamental. A T-shaped person moves between domains. A polymath architect lives in the spaces between them.
The Discomfort of Permanent Incompleteness
Here's what nobody tells you. This actually feels worse than the T-shape in some ways.
You're never the smartest person in the room about anything. You can't be. You're always learning, always aware of what you don't know. When I'm in a technical discussion about database architecture, I know enough to ask good questions and spot when something won't work for users. But I'll never be the database person. I'm not sure that's psychologically sustainable long-term, and I think we should talk about that more honestly instead of framing this as just "growth mindset."
- You become dangerous (in a good way)
- You also become comfortable with being wrong, often, in front of people who are deeper in specific domains than you are, and that requires a kind of ego flexibility that not everyone has
- Your value proposition shifts from expertise to synthesis
Why This Matters for Bogotá's Tech Scene
We're in a position where the old playbook doesn't fit. Most teams here are small, distributed, scrappy. You can't afford to hire the pure specialist who only designs or only codes. You need people who can wear multiple hats not because it's trendy, but because the alternative is moving slow.
That's actually an advantage. While Silicon Valley is still trying to unbundle disciplines, we're forced to integrate them. The constraint becomes the competitive edge.
But only if we stop pretending this is about being a "full-stack designer" or whatever the current terminology is. It's not a feature you add to your brand. It's about how you actually think about problems. Messily. Across boundaries. Without the safety of a clear vertical bar to retreat into when things get complicated.
The Honest Part
I don't know if this scales. I don't know if this mindset works in larger organizations with more defined roles. Maybe the T-shape was a real answer for a different problem, and I'm just describing what happens when you have no choice but to integrate.
What I do know is that waiting for someone else to own the intersection between design and engineering and product is how we end up shipping things that feel disconnected. And I'm more interested in being useful in the space where those conversations happen than being expert in the safety of one lane.
Even if I'm not sure that's sustainable.
