Navigating The Specialist-Generalist Career Challenge

In cross-functional teams, generalists perform better. Their ability to flex across disciplines and help out wherever needed makes them indispensable in modern product development. Yet, when it comes to hiring and promotions, companies overwhelmingly favour specialists.

Companies are recognising this challenge, but it has definitely not been solved yet. Spotify are experimenting with a new skills-first model that rewards skills regardless of functional alignment. It's early days, but hopefully they are successful and we get a second Spotify Model to copy!

There is one exception though - leadership positions. Once you have climbed the ladder and moved into management, cross-functional skills become more highly prized.

This means that, short-term, it is better to focus on your function, but, long-term, for your career, cross-functional skills are more beneficial.

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

Navigating The Specialist-Generalist Career Challenge by Rory Madden
The future belongs not to pure specialists or generalists, but to those who can maintain deep expertise while developing the broad understanding and collaborative skills that modern organisations need.

Good Leader, Bad Leader by Ant Murphy
Good leaders create clarity, psychological safety, and accountability; bad ones generate confusion and fear. The difference lies not in intent but in consistent communication, follow-through, and how they handle uncertainty.

Product Direction

When Should You Stop Clinging To Product And Hire Your First PM? by Saumil Mehta
Hiring a first product manager too early can create friction, while hiring too late slows growth. The right timing depends on when founders need someone to connect vision with execution and bring clarity to scaling teams.

How Do You Deal With An Executive Demanding Features? by Kai Wong
When leadership pushes for specific features, reframing the request as a hypothesis keeps teams outcome-focused. This approach aligns stakeholders, clarifies assumptions, and preserves a culture of evidence-based product decisions.

Continuous Research

The Impact Of Invisible Stigma On User Interviews: Lessons For UX Researchers by Laura Wissiak
Unseen stigma, like disability, trauma, or social anxiety, can shape how participants respond in interviews. Recognising these hidden dynamics helps researchers create safer environments and gather more authentic, unbiased insights.

Human + Machine: Responsible AI Workflows For UX Research by Sahil Afrid Farookhi
Integrating AI into research workflows requires clear boundaries between automation and human judgment. Responsible use means designing systems that enhance speed and scale without compromising empathy, ethics, or data integrity.

Continuous Design

Why Designing Terrible Solutions Makes You A Better Designer by Fabricio Teixeira
Exploring intentionally bad ideas can unlock creative breakthroughs. By lowering the pressure for perfection, teams open space for experimentation, humour, and unexpected insights that often lead to stronger final designs.

3 UX Tips To Make “Aha Moments” Click by Dan Benoni
This case study breaks down how Too Good To Go uses behavioural design to turn curiosity into action. Clear copy, emotional storytelling, and progressive commitment guide users from awareness to their first food rescue.

Continuous Development

Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software by Conrad Irwin
Large language models can generate code, but they don’t understand intent, trade-offs, or evolving context. Building software still requires human reasoning to connect technical decisions with real-world constraints and outcomes.

The Reality Of AI-assisted Software Engineering Productivity by Addy Osmani
AI tools are reshaping how code is written, reviewed, and maintained... but not without trade-offs. True productivity gains come from integrating AI into existing engineering practices, not replacing them, and staying intentional about quality and context.

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Mark Your Calendar, Black Friday Is Coming!

Lowest Price Point & First Part Of The Agenda Released

This year, Black Friday at UXDX isn’t just about getting a great deal; it’s your first look at what’s next. From 28 November to 1 December, tickets for UXDX USA & EMEA 2026 will be available at up to 50% off, alongside the reveal of the first part of our agenda.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to plan, this is it. Get your approvals sorted now so you don’t miss the lowest price when tickets drop on 28 November. Save the UXDX 2026 ticket page and get ready to be part of the conversations shaping the future of product, UX, design, and engineering.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Video Of The Week
Evolution of Grammarly's Platform:
From Developer Operations to Developer Experience

What happens when 500 engineers spend more time maintaining systems than building products? At Grammarly, the answer wasn’t another tool. It was a mindset shift. In this session from UXDX EMEA 2025, Serhii Vasylenko (Senior Software Engineer, Grammarly) shares how the team rethought “you build it, you run it” to empower developers without overwhelming them, turning platform ownership into a catalyst for speed and quality.

Discover how Grammarly cut onboarding from four weeks to one, turned complex infrastructure into self-service workflows, and saved over 200 engineering hours per day with AI-assisted tooling. All while evolving the platform group into a true product organisation. Watch now to see how redefining DevOps around developer experience can unlock focus, reduce toil, and scale product velocity:

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: How often does your team actually implement improvements identified in retrospectives?

Last week’s poll asked how often teams actually act on the improvements identified in retrospectives, and the results show just how hard it is to turn reflection into real change. Only 16% say their teams follow through on almost all agreed actions, while 17% report they usually do. The majority, however, admit that improvements are implemented only sometimes (21%), rarely (34%), or almost never (12%).

This highlights a recurring problem in agile practice: retrospectives often generate valuable insights that never make it past the board. Whether it’s due to shifting priorities, delivery pressure, or lack of ownership, the gap between identifying problems and fixing them remains wide.

The most effective teams close that gap by treating retros as part of the delivery cycle, not an add-on. Committing to small, measurable improvements each sprint rather than grand resolutions that fade after the meeting ends.