Not everyone needs to be talking to customers
Product gurus will tell you that the way to heaven is for everyone in the company to take part in discovery. Engineers should be talking to customers! Designers should do more research!
The idea that we should involve everyone in everything is appealing when we don't know how to collaborate. It's like pulling everyone into a meeting. Nobody knew how to break the problem apart, so now twenty people are sitting around the table. Putting everybody in one room is the lowest denominator of collaboration. Same with asking everyone to take part in the same work.
Pushing people into areas where they aren't necessarily strong or interested is an uphill battle. There are lots of amazing engineers who love technical problems and don't like talking to customers. There are extremely good interaction designers who can't pick a font. There are incredible visual designers who elevate everyone's work and don't like negotiating the scope.
Real collaboration is when someone knows something deeply, another person knows something else deeply, and we put our heads together. We bridge the gaps, we fill in different perspectives, we add in information the other doesn't have. It's 1+1=3. More comes out than we put in.
A product person can deeply understand the customer. An engineer can deeply understands what's possible in code. And these two can have an incredibly productive session together. When the shaping is over, the engineer can go back to coding and the product person can go back to interviewing. Swap in any roles you like: designer, business analyst, front end engineer, SRE...
From founding teams to scale-ups to small squads in big businesses, I've seen this collaboration of experts work. But doing it requires more than throwing people into a room. The "product trio" doesn't work magically on its own. What we need to collaborate better is (1) appreciation of each others' strengths and (2) a common language to communicate with.
There are many, many ways to do that. But one accessible technique is breadboarding in a shaping session. A breadboard is concrete enough to see problems and surface issues, yet lightweight enough for a group to stay engaged and make changes on the fly. Here's a talk from Y Oslo where I gave a play-by-play showing how a product trio can make shaping decisions with a breadboard.
See the case study on breadboarding, starting at 11:38.
Of course, T-shaped people are important in some roles. And unicorns who can do it all are amazing. But we aren't all those, and we don't need to be. Being a specialist, being known for our expertise, and working with skilled people who we respect is a true pleasure. We just need to learn how to do it.
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There are a few seats available for the December cohort of Shaping in Real Life. The two-week remote course includes a live workshop where you learn how to bring different roles together and run a shaping session.