Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

3 types of designers you need on your team

3 Mar 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:05

In this brief YouTube talk, the speaker outlines three valuable designer archetypes for modern product teams. First, "strong generalists" are lock‑shaped T‑shaped designers who excel (top‑20% performance) in several core skills—design, product, and engineering—allowing them to flexibly expand their role as responsibilities blur. Second, "deep specialists" are also T‑shaped but have an unusually deep expertise at the tip of the T, providing high‑impact depth in a particular domain while still being able to collaborate across functions. Third, the "cracked new grad" is an early‑career hire who, despite limited experience, demonstrates wisdom, humility, and a rapid learning ability, offering a fresh, adaptable perspective that can keep pace with evolving role expectations. The speaker argues that hiring strategies should balance these archetypes to build resilient, versatile design teams.

Chapters

There's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now. The first one I would call is strong generalists. So not just like regular generalists, but people that are almost lock shaped. You know, in that T shaped framework, they're really good at a few core skills, like 80th percentile. The design role we've already seen is stretching and spanning. We're all becoming more PM shaped. We're all becoming engineering shaped. And so if you already have strong skills in a few different buckets, it's really easy for you to sort of flex around and expand your role. Then the other person that's really exciting to me is in that T shaped framework, a deep specialist, someone who's T shaped but the tip of the T goes down farther than most other people. And then my last one is probably the one that I think we're all overlooking, which is what I call the cracked new grad. It's just somebody whose early career feels wise and experienced beyond their years, but is also just very humble and very eager to learn. Most companies are just hiring senior talent, but given how much the roles are changing and what we're expected to do is changing, I think, I think having somebody who almost has like a blank slate and is just a really quick learner, that's super valuable.