Team & Organizational · master area

T-Shaped People

Deep in one craft, working in two or three adjacent. The shape that makes the trio work — three people who can challenge each other's assumptions because they understand enough of the adjacent craft to know when something is missing.

Owners: Individual (self-development), supported by Tech Lead and PO Phase it lives in: Continuous The corpus principle this enacts: The chain's boundary crossings build the horizontal bar of the T.

Where it lives in the chain

• After We Build · The Team — T-shaped people — the canon

How to do this

The chain produces T-shaped people naturally. Each boundary crossing widens the horizontal bar:

• A developer who reads the brief and walks through the moment with the PO develops product sense.
• A designer who reviews the Storybook catalogue develops technical sense.
• A PO who reads the sequence diagram alongside the Tech Lead develops architectural sense.
• A QA who pairs with a developer during amigos develops engineering sense.

The horizontal grows by participation, not by training. Reading a book about design is not the same as sitting next to a designer during cross-referencing.

What good T-shape looks like

The developer can read a Feature Brief and ask a substantive product question — "What happens if Gal submits when she's not online?" — that wasn't on the page. The designer can read an API contract and flag a flow gap — "There's no error response for permission-revoked-mid-flow, but the wireframe shows that state." The PO can read a postmortem and trace it to a chain level themselves — "This looks like adr-drift; the contract test was never run."

A team made entirely of vertical specialists is a team where every cross-craft conversation has to be translated. A team of T-shaped people speaks one language at the boundaries — and the boundaries are where meaning is lost.

Related crafts

• Small Team Adaptation — where T-shape becomes survival
• Hiring for Chain Fit — where the shape is recognised
• Onboarding — where the horizontal bar begins to grow