Unpopular Opinion: Not all growth marketers are T-Shaped professionals. Here's the truth!

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If you have been calling yourself a T-shaped marketer, this post will help you realize you're more skilled than how you define yourself. T-shaped is almost 40-year-old concept and it is no longer practical.

Many growth marketers fancy calling themselves T-shaped. However, the reality is, they are far more skilled than T-shaped.

Today, I encourage you to break-free from the shackles that gurus and course sellers have been trying to put on you. You're more skilled and you can't be caged by their their limiting belief called T-shaped.

This post not only gives you two strong reasons to quit calling yourself T-shaped but also shows you a practical and accurate way to define yourself as a top growth professional.

Shapes are metaphors used in job recruitment​

Shapes are metaphors used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of a person in the workforce. Different shapes, expertise and their meaning are as follows:

T-shaped -- T-shaped players are professionals who are both generalists and an expert. They are highly skilled at a broad set of skills (the top of the T) and have specific expertise within a discipline (the vertical leg of the T).

One of the oldest references can be found in the 1980s the term "T-shaped man" was used internally by McKinsey & Company for recruiting and developing consultants and partners.

Other Shapes --

• X-shaped for leadership
• I-shaped for individual depth-skill without communication skills
• Tree-shaped for a person with depth in many areas or branches of a field
• Multiple Mountains shaped (coined by Forrest Z. Shooster) for individuals with depth in overlapping several fields rather than a shallow depth in many or a singular depth in one field who specialize in the overlap between those fields

Γ- and Μ-shaped individuals (gamma and mu, respectively) have been described by Brittany Fiore in her ethnographic work of data science research communities to indicate people with supporting strengths in computationally- and software-intensive fields.

Similarly, π-shaped skills (after the Greek letter pi) refer to "a broad mastery of general management skills atop a few spikes of deep functional or domain expertise".

Why not use the term "T-Skilled"?​

Although T-skilled is a great term on the surface, when you take a moment to think it through you soon start to see that it isn't correct.

There are two primary reasons why "T-skilled" isn't the right term:

1. T-skilled is great in theory, but observably not true in practice. To see what this mean, consider Figure 2 (generalizing specialist). That's clearly not a T. Very few people, if any, have deep skills in a single area and then general skills everywhere else. They have varying levels of skills in a range of areas, sometimes very deep skills in a few areas. A more accurate term would be "comb shaped", but that just doesn't sound as cool as "T-shaped".
2. T-skilled says nothing of the journey. As a term, T-skilled tries to describe the destination, which is fine. "Generalizing specialist", or "specializing generalist" in a few cases, captures the idea of the journey that you're on. As in many other aspects of life, it really is the journey that's the important thing, not the destination.

Generalist --

https://preview.redd.it/adlxgqhvbuf...bp&s=85ac4f76050fa50d1ad23fa4e2891e98f3bfc07a

Generalizing Specialist --

https://preview.redd.it/vhgmz5o1cuf...bp&s=54c3bba1f7634f7b4d9d4aae2ad5004b6b2e938e

Specialist --

https://preview.redd.it/zhlxojf6cuf...bp&s=b6e4927811a06de462148f5febbbc4627be44bb1

Super Skilled --

https://preview.redd.it/nby5y9eacuf...bp&s=b46141714f5dfd3034a8f9477741c1af6ce1c2c9

GrowthSet: practical and accurate model to define growth roles​

GrowthSet is the latest practical and accurate way to define any role, position or function in a startup growth team.

During recruitment and startup growth team building, roles can be better represented using the Growthset model.

Growthset = Skillset + Mindset + Toolset

For a content marketer, Growthset would look like this --

Growthset of a Content Marketer

Using the same model, you can define a more generalist role such as Growth Manager. Hence, T-Shaped theory can be replaced by Growthset for more accurate definition of growth roles.

For any job post, you may see companies defining what skills you need to know, what tools you should be aware of and what mindset or soft skills you must already possess. Every job / role / position can be precisely defined using the GrowthSet model.

References:

• All graphs are taken from agilemodeling(dot)com
• Image and the term Growthset is from The Growth Hacking Book Series, Rohan Chaubey, Noah Kagan and et al.
• Various shapes and their metaphor for expertise is from Wikipedia