The market says go deep. Pick a lane. Become the design systems person, the motion designer, the AI product specialist. Build a niche, find an audience, be findable.
I went the other way. Here's why it was the right call, and what it actually cost.
The misconception
Generalism doesn't mean shallow. That's the mistake people make.
Generalism, done right, is depth applied across a wider surface. Not a little about everything — deep in multiple places, with enough pattern recognition to see what transfers.
The design decisions I'm most proud of didn't come from design expertise. They came from knowing just enough about an adjacent domain to ask the question nobody else was asking.
At Airtel, what looked like a UX problem was a pricing architecture problem. I saw it because I'd spent time in a startup where pricing was survival, not the PM's concern.
At Microsoft, what looked like an interaction design problem was a trust calibration problem. I'd seen that pattern before — not in enterprise software, but in consumer apps where wrong recommendations were public and costly.
The dots connected because I had enough dots to connect.
The shape is wrong
You've heard of the T-shaped designer — deep in one area, broad across many. It's a reasonable frame. But I think the actual shape is a comb.
Multiple depths. Multiple spikes. Not a single vertical.
Mine: product design craft, design systems, UX research, business strategy, early-stage product development, AI-native interaction. None shallow. Each took years. And they connect in ways a single spike couldn't.
The breadth isn't the concession. It's the whole point.
What it actually costs
Generalism costs legibility.
The specialist with a clear niche is findable. Their portfolio tells a tighter story. Their community signal is stronger. They have a benchmark — they know who the best practitioners are.
As a generalist, the benchmark is fuzzier. Some rooms won't let you in. Roles that want a pure researcher or a pure systems designer. I've been passed over for those. That's fine. They weren't the right rooms.
What the range has returned: I've never been bored. Never felt like I was solving the same problem twice. The best work of my career came from moments where I brought something unexpected — not because I was smarter than the specialists in the room, but because I'd seen the problem from a different angle.
That's the return. Not a tighter career ladder. A wider range of useful perspectives.
One thing worth saying directly
Go deep first. You need to be good at something before you can be interesting across many things. The depth is the foundation.
But don't confuse the foundation with the destination.
If you find yourself genuinely curious about adjacent disciplines — business, engineering, research, writing — that's not distraction. That's signal. The generalist's path is built one genuine curiosity at a time.