Become A Tinkerer

Pick a lane is dead

Henry Ford’s assembly line was a masterpiece of constraint. One person attaches the wheel. Another bolts the axle. Nobody crosses stations because crossing was genuinely expensive (training a welder to paint took months). The resistance was real, and specialization was the rational response.

Software companies borrowed the whole model. PM writes the spec, designer mocks it up, engineer builds it, QA tests it, marketing launches it. Stations on a line. The org chart grew around those skill gaps like a city grows around a river. Agile tried to fix it. We moved from waterfall to sprints but kept all the handoffs. Faster cycles, but the same stations.

AI collapsed those skill gaps in months. The org chart stayed exactly where it was.

I’ve been a generalist my entire career. Never picked a lane. At every company I just found the most important problem and went after it, regardless of whose job it was supposed to be. For most of my career that felt like swimming against the current.

Not anymore. No fast-growing startup I know hires just a PM or just a marketer anymore. They want tinkerers. That marketer? She’s in Claude figuring out what the last deploy changed, building the landing page herself, writing ad copy, and launching the campaign before she goes home. No tickets. No handoffs. The engineer ships the feature, creates the launch video, spins up agents to review the PR, and owns what happens after it goes live. Nobody told them to work this way. There was just a problem and they went after it.

Early startups always operated like this. No boundaries, just outcomes. The difference now is that AI lets you keep that scrappiness at 50, 100, 200 people. The gaps that forced specialization at scale are gone. These teams pay more in tokens than they’d spend on new hires.

I was at the office with a founder in our portfolio yesterday. He walked me through a feature. Customer research, design, code, launch. All him. I asked who else was involved and he kind of laughed. “Why would I hand it off? I had all the context.”

“Pick a lane” needs to be demolished. What to build is way more important than how to build now. Generalist vs. specialist was always the wrong debate. Ownership versus dependency. That’s the only question that matters.

Most people don’t cross though. I get it. Your title starts to feel like who you are. Touching someone else’s territory feels wrong. And yeah, the first few times you’ll be bad at it. But a rough version you ship with full context in your head beats whatever gets delivered six weeks later. Three handoffs strip out everything that matters. Nobody gives you permission to cross. Performance reviews actively punish it. We need to stop obeying a system that stopped making sense years ago.

Companies that don’t fix this will bleed their best people to ones that already have. Give them space, ambition, hard targets and watch what happens.

Ford’s assembly line was genius for 1913. The resistance between stations was real.

That resistance is gone. And every day you stay at yours, someone without your title, your permission, your experience is shipping the thing you’ve been waiting to hand off.