Marginalia

Becoming T-shaped

Chris Strickland

04 Mar 2026 — 1 min read

How to use short learning sprints to build breadth

Working with Scrum teams, one of the common practices that get talked about is that we want T-shaped people on our teams (deep expertise + wide across disciplines). I believe that is needed in all types of teams, not just in software development.

But what does it look like to build those adjacent skills? And is that applicable to solo work?

Instead of thinking of those 10,000 hours you need to build the deep part of your T-skills, what do you do for your broad skills? This idea from Ayodeji Awosika shows a way to learn a bit and move on to the next area.

20 hour focused learning can be used to build up enough knowledge to become familiar and know where the complexities lie. 20 hours won't make you an expert, but it is enough to learn the lay of the land. Then if the need or interest is still there, pick a piece you just learned about and go 20 hours deeper into that.

I'm working on this idea now by creating my own curriculum. The obvious place to be starting today is with AI. I had to learn the basics first by just using it as a Google replacement. Now I'm starting new areas of study like performing research and analysis. I plan on trying my hand at coding too.

I can already see the approach working for me.

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