Matt Jukes’ recent post on Multi-hyphenates got a lot of comments on Twitter and certainly struck a note with me.
Like Matt, I started my ‘digital’ journey in an earlier era. I started running a University website with Microsoft FrontPage, then did a postgraduate course at Birkbeck in Web Design and Development.
It was definitely the age of the generalist and looking back, I was often managing products, even though my job title never said that.But as Matt says, as the internet became more pervasive and mission critical, roles became more deeply specialised and narrowly defined. My experience was that it became harder to move outside of the box that you’d ended up in.
The UK government Digital, Data and Technology capability framework is an admiral effort to codify the variety of roles and I had a major hand in creating and defining the performance analysis role. We were at pains to state the need to understand and work effectively with other disciplines.
But, I’d argue, in digital teams, it’s the role of the product and delivery managers to facilitate team members to work across and have a voice across other disciplines than their labelled role.