Broad enough to collaborate, deep enough to deliver

A friend posted recently about a project she just wrapped, and some of her commentary was, "I learned a lot."

She's been in this industry for decades.

It made me laugh, because it's true for all of us. New biz pitch lands, everyone sits around the table, and the honest truth is nobody fully knows what to do yet. We figure it out together. And clients pay us a lot of money to do exactly that.

Are we all phonies? No. The value isn't that we've done this exact thing before. The value is that we've worked through enough adjacent problems to know how to work through this one. Recognizing patterns, trusting instincts, and knowing how to sit in the discomfort of not-knowing and come out the other side with something good.

The T-shape is real. Broad enough to sit at the table with strategy, creative, production, and tech. Deep enough in one thing to actually deliver. Both halves matter, and both take time to build.

So when you're hiring, and a candidate doesn't have the exact experience you're looking for, ask a better question: have they figured hard things out before? Because that's the actual skill.