Hacker News Reader

Comment by JSR_FDED | Hacker News Reader

This ”de-specialization” move is something I’ve seen several times from consultants like McKinsey. The guy who did it at Nike was from Bain.

They reorganized my company accordingly, to disastrous effect. Customers used come in and talk to product managers with very deep experience in their market, and it would blow their socks off. After the reorg customers would come in and talk to a random generalist who could talk for 7 minutes about 10 different markets each. Imagine how that felt to customers, that feeling of “I know more about this than my vendor does”.

View on HN

De-specialization is the wet dream of any accounting-focused leader. When everyone is just some dude, they all become fungible. And you see, it's just math. Just keep stacking dudes and it works the same, it scales.

But, no it doesn't. 10 juniors does not make a senior. 100 juniors doesn't. Not even a thousand. Because they actually do different things. You can replace a specialist with 10 generalists and expect that to work, but it keeps happening.

The dream is having labor so stupid, so worthless, that it's practically free. But that's very risky. That, like, IS your company. The people are it. If all the people suck and are fungible and you move them around and rotate them non-stop, then what does that mean for your company? I don't know, but you save a little bit of money for a short while.

Having been on the customer side of your scenario (in the manufacturing sector), this hits deep. It's that feeling of being on a phone tree, and needing to jump through hoops to find the person who can actually help you. But you're in person. And they probably fired the person who has the experience you're looking for, because experience isn't able to be quantified in a column on a spreadsheet.

This is exactly the pattern. The de-specialization playbook works on spreadsheets but rarely survives contact with customers who expect expertise. In Nike's case, it also broke the feedback loop between product development and the athletes and coaches who actually test the gear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com