Products need focus. People need range.

A few years into my career, a recruiter friend pulled up my LinkedIn and said, "This looks all over the place".

At that point I’d gone from engineering into product, then done consulting stints at a handful of companies. To her, none of it added up.

If she thought that was all over the place, she’d love what came next. More consumer hardware. A consumer product brand I started myself. B2B software. Now autonomous freight rail. Plus golf, drumming, DJing, and Spanish along the way.

I get it. People like boxes. Put someone in a box and you know what to expect from them, what to ask them, and what they’re "for". It’s easier. We all do it.

The recruiting process is where I felt it most. People want a label. Is she a growth person? A B2C person? A platform person? What’s her domain?

I’d spend a couple of years on one kind of product, then move and spend a couple of years on something completely different. If you looked at my resume and asked, "What exactly is she good at?" or "What industry does she know?", I wouldn’t blame you for not having an answer.

These days, the label that usually sticks is “hardware background”. It’s the easy shorthand, even though within hardware category, I’ve worked on software, devices, manufacturing, and everything in between.

Now contrast this to my career as a product leader. In product, I spend most of my time fighting the opposite problem. With products, everyone wants them to do everything. One more feature. One more customer type. One more use case. The requests are endless. Keeping a product focused is hard and a lot of teams never pull it off.

With people, we flip it. Pick a lane. Specialize. Be the "X person".

I always chuckle at this. Companies can’t keep their products focused, even though products need it. But when they hire, they want specialists. Sometimes that’s the right call. If you need a deep expert in one thing, hire one. But here’s the irony: we hire people for being specialists, then promote the best of them into jobs that need generalists. The higher you go, the broader the job gets. A CEO isn’t a specialist in anything. The CEO's job is to connect the dots and see how every piece fits the company’s goals.

For the first five or six years of my career, I didn’t have a good answer to "So what’s your story?" I’d list my jobs and hope it made sense.

It got better with time. I’d sit down with hiring managers and hear some version of this: "Honestly, when this call got scheduled, I wasn’t sure what to make of you. You’ve jumped around a bit. But there was something interesting in your background, enough that I wanted to talk. Now that you’ve walked me through it and why you made each move, it makes sense".

The thing is my career didn’t change, my understanding of it did. Looking back, there was a through line. I just hadn’t named it yet.

Here’s what I often tell people. The difference between me and most people isn’t that I have a lot of interests. Plenty of people do. It’s that I’m not afraid to explore them. I am not afraid to take the first step and over time, I've gotten good at making time to follow through.

The other part? A lot of my career has been me proving something to myself.

Once, I saw a job I was excited about and reached out to the hiring manager. His answer was basically: "You have no software experience". The role was B2B SaaS, and because I hadn’t done B2B SaaS, he assumed I hadn’t done software at all.

I had years of software experience across hardware, consumer products, and connected devices. Sure, B2B SaaS is its own breed. But if you know how to build good products, the fundamentals carry over. Software is software.

At the time, I decided that was the one gap on my resume that I needed to close and I did.

I joined Slabstack, a construction tech company, as the first product hire. The team was a few engineers. The product was thin. Even simple features took forever to ship. Sales was struggling because the product was missing things customers considered basic and engineering couldn’t commit to dates for building them.

The problem was part speed, part discovery. Nobody had a clear picture of what customers actually needed. I helped fix that.

Over the next 18 months, we shipped a lot faster, built features customers loved, and grew revenue 22x. The company was eventually acquired, in large part because of how valuable the product had become.

The success of the product and outcome provided much needed validation about me and my approach to building products.

Pickytarian came from the same place. I wanted to know what it felt like to own and operate a business end to end. I came up with the concept, designed the product, and secured a design patent. Then I figured out manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and all the logistics of running a physical products business. After that came the daily grind of managing a P&L and keeping it cash-flowing. The business is still running and growing.

All right, confession time: I’m not a master of most of the things I’ve tried.

I learn enough to get decent. Sometimes I keep going. A lot of the time, I don’t.

There’s an old saying: "Jack of all trades, master of none". People usually stop there. I only recently learned there’s more to it: "but oftentimes better than a master of one".

Years ago, I taught myself to make beats on a little MIDI keyboard. I got decent, moved on, and the tracks just sat in a folder on my computer.

Then the blockchain hype hit. I’d been an early Bitcoin user and wanted to go deeper than the basics, so I started a podcast called Onchain Medley. Twelve episodes. I learned to record and edit. And when I needed intro and outro music, I dug up those old beats and reworked them.

Something I’d dropped years earlier turned out to be exactly what I needed. Another dot, connected.

I don’t make beats or podcasts anymore. I also learned how to bartend and even got licensed, just because I was curious. I bartended a few house parties but never worked a single shift behind a bar.

I often reach a point where I say: okay, I tried it, don’t care for it anymore, but at least I’ve done it.

Some things do stick. Golf is my favorite thing to work on right now. I’ve gotten a lot better over the last four years, enough to play in mini-tournaments. I’m learning Spanish too. I understand a lot now. Speaking is what I’m still working on.

I used to think dropping things was a flaw. Quitting felt like failing. Not going deep felt shallow.

Now I think it’s one of my most useful habits. You don’t have to become an expert for something to be worth doing. Trying it, learning enough to get it, and walking away seeing things a little differently counts. Sometimes it even comes back around when you least expect it.

And doing that over and over taught me the most important skill I have: how to learn.

All that exploring turned into something I couldn’t really put into words until a few years ago. I’m comfortable in ambiguity. I know how to figure things out and get shit done.

I’ve always been the person people turn to when nobody’s quite sure what “done” looks like yet. Over the last ten years, the ambiguous problems have gotten bigger. I’ve grown into them.

When you’ve been a beginner over and over, a problem with no map stops being scary. You’ve been there before. You know how to find the first few steps, figure out what matters, and cut a trail where there isn’t one yet.

That’s what great product work needs. Not someone who’s solved this exact problem before. Someone who knows how to find their way through one they haven’t.

So if you’ve been putting something off because you’re not sure you’ll be good at it, or not sure you’ll stick with it, start anyway.

Take the first step. Learn enough to be decent. Let yourself stop if it’s not for you. You’ll still walk away with something.

Your products need focus. You need range.

And that’s why this blog isn’t going to be about one thing either.