7 years ago (damn I'm old) I wrote How To Become A Customer Acquisition Expert. It has been one of my most popular posts where I defined what a T - Shaped Marketer looked like. I need to do a massive update, because there is a lot that I consider wrong in that post now after seeing a lot of people mis-apply it.
The most common mis-application is that it leads people to thinking the best approach early in their career is to be a generalist - know a little about every channel. Or even worse, thinking that they are an expert in every channel. It would take a life time to become an expert in every channel, so if you come across those who say they are...run in the opposite direction.
Being A Generalist Does Not Maximize Your Career Path
But being a generalist almost never maximizes your career path. A good quote from Matt Greenberg, CTO @ Reforge and Former VP Engineering at Credit Karma:
"Impact is the most valuable thing you can grow in order to grow your career. The bigger the problem the bigger the impact needed to resolve it. In our career, learning to tackle the biggest problems well gets us the most personal and professional return. But the bigger the problem, the deeper the expertise is required to solve it. For simple problems in our bathroom, you can do it yourself. When the problems get large enough, you hire a plumber. As a company scales it is almost always looking to replace generalists with specialists who can do something the generalist could never do."
The Trap Of "Knowing" Something
A separate trap is the illusion of knowing vs doing. I know a decent amount around branding, positioning, and naming. I can tell you what great looks like and why. I can pontificate on examples all the day long. But creating from scratch? Oof...I struggle. It just isn't how my brain works and I haven't had enough reps at it to become great.
I hear this from others all the time. "Oh, I already know that." But have you actually tried to do it? Once you try to do it, you realize the depth of nuance that exists and how much there is to learn. There is nothing that highlights that your knowledge is actually surface level than trying to do it.
Thinking In Experiments
Even if you know how to do something well, doing it in a new context often requires revalidating your assumptions for a new industry and a new company or even just a new set of target users. This is where having an experimental mindset and a hypothesis-driven process can be so valuable. It forces you to declare your assumptions, state your reasoning, and validate them with data. Thinking in experiments isn't about A/B tests, it's a consistent and disciplined approach for solidifying and expanding your knowledge more quickly. As Elena Verna (Ex SVP of Growth @SurveyMonkey and Malwarebytes) likes to say:
" There's always a gap between perception and reality. Experimentation is how you collect knowledge to close that gap. If you take a hypothesis-driven approach to selecting company strategy, setting OKRs, launching features, etc, you will avoid being blinded by your own biases and false assumptions."
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