Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert and an unlikely source of career philosophy, made an observation some years ago that has since been cited widely enough to have almost lost its edge. The idea was this: rather than trying to be the best in the world at one thing, which is extraordinarily difficult, you build a combination of skills that, together, make you rare. You stack capabilities that do not usually appear in the same person. The intersection is where the value lives.
The concept has circulated mostly in entrepreneurial circles, applied mostly to individuals navigating uncertain career paths. I want to make a different argument: that skill stacking is not just a useful personal strategy. It is increasingly the structural requirement for effective technology leadership.
The most persistent tension in technology organisations is not between business and engineering, though that tension is real and well-documented. It is between the people who understand what needs to be built and the people who understand why, and the people who understand whether it is actually working. In many organisations, these are three different functions, operating in sequence rather than in concert. The result is a familiar failure mode: products that are technically sound, strategically justifiable, and persistently underused.
The leaders who break this pattern, and I have observed this across roles and organisations, are almost never the deepest specialist in any single discipline. They are the people who can hold the business context and the user insight and the data signal in the same mental model at the same time and make a decision that accounts for all three.
That is not a natural gift. It is a built capability. And it tends to be built, in my experience, by people who have been willing to move across disciplines rather than advancing within a single lane.
My own path looked, from the outside, like a series of lateral moves. A mathematics and computer science degree. A career that began in business development, moved through project leadership, into product ownership, then a deliberate pause for an MBA and a data analytics bootcamp, and eventually into a data analyst role at a major telecommunications company before moving into product management. Every transition felt, in the moment, like a step sideways. In retrospect, each one was adding a layer.
The MBA gave me the language of business strategy and financial decision-making, not as abstract concepts but as tools I could apply immediately. The CodeFirstGirls bootcamp gave me technical credibility I had not had before, and something less tangible: the experience of being a beginner again, which is its own form of education. The data analyst role gave me fluency with the infrastructure that product decisions are built on. And the product work, all the way back to the university platform I built from scratch in Lagos, gave me the user grounding that makes all the other layers useful.
None of these capabilities is remarkable in isolation. Together, they create something that is genuinely hard to replicate, not because the skills are rare individually, but because the combination is.
Liz Wiseman, in her research on what she calls “Multipliers” – leaders who make the people around them more capable rather than less, identifies a consistent pattern: the most effective leaders in complex environments are those who bring broad contextual awareness rather than deep narrow expertise. They ask better questions because they understand more of the landscape. They make better decisions because they are not defending a single disciplinary perspective.
I think about this when I work with young people at career fairs, or when I am judging at the Young Coders competition or the Big Bang Competition. The students who stand out are rarely the ones who have gone deepest into a single subject. They are the ones who have connected ideas across domains, who have looked at a problem in one field and brought a tool from another to solve it. That cross-domain instinct, which looks like creativity, is actually a skill. And it is one that education systems, with their increasing emphasis on specialisation, are not always well designed to cultivate.
This is part of why I take the STEM ambassador work seriously, beyond the obvious value of encouraging young people into technology careers. The deeper argument I want to make to the students I meet, particularly the ones who feel they do not fit the conventional image of a technology professional is that the edges between disciplines are not limitations. They are advantages. The person who has studied mathematics and can also write clearly and also understands how users behave is not a generalist in the pejorative sense. They are a system thinker. And system thinkers are precisely what complex technology programmes need.
Reid Hoffman has described career development as a series of “tours of duty” rather than a linear ascent, deliberate periods of investment in a particular context, followed by a transition that builds on what was learned. What makes this framing useful is that it treats lateral movement as strategy rather than failure. Every tour adds a layer. Every transition test whether the layers actually connect.
The question I would put to anyone reading this: whether you are early in a technology career or well into one, is not what you are specialising in. It is what the combination looks like. What is your second layer? What is the capability that sits underneath your primary skill and makes it more powerful? What would you need to learn to make your current expertise genuinely rare?
The technology sector has a habit of rewarding depth in the short term and breadth in the long one. The leaders who shape organisations, who influence the direction of the field, who are still building interesting things a decade from now; they have almost always invested in the stack, not just the top layer.
That investment is rarely comfortable. Being a beginner again, as I discovered in a data analytics bootcamp, has a particular kind of discomfort to it. But it is also, I have found, the most reliable signal that you are still growing.
The lane is safe. The stack is where the leadership lives.
