How to pitch your value as a generalist

An easy 3-step framework to help you flex your worth 💪

Oct 07, 2022

Q: How do you position your value as a generalist [and get a job]?

In between startups, I briefly flirted with the idea of going back to a more established tech company. The problem was, after time away from the big tech world, I had no idea what type of role to interview for. I had done everything from high level strategy to user research, product management, people ops, marketing, web development, light coding, customer support, and more — and yet, it didn’t feel like my skillset neatly fit into any well-defined job ladder. “Jack of all trades, master of none”... right?

At the same time, I had developed a real skill-set — the ability to quickly stand up new systems and functions in an environment of extreme ambiguity. As a relentless doer, my strengths were in problem-solving, connecting dots and ultimately moving projects forward.

After all was said and done, I ended up at another early stage startup whose mission deeply resonated with me. My pitch? To be the person who can fearlessly navigate the chaos and continuously make things happen, in service of the business. (Scroll to the bottom for the exact email pitch I used to land my role as an operator at Abridge.)

Making the pitch

Based on some conversations with other operators, here are some tips to help pitch the value of bringing in an ops person at a startup:

My latent graphic making skills in action :)

1. Start with understanding the current challenges of the company.

My first job out of college was in ad sales. While it wasn’t the long-term job for me, it introduced me to the concept of solution selling — approaching a situation with empathy to better understand a company’s current pain points and needs (and therefore better position yourself and the role). Some questions to think through:

What stage is the company currently in? This is helpful context for figuring out the types of challenges a company may be currently facing, as well as how built-out various functions may be.
What does success in a year look like? How about in 5? Beyond helping you understand whether you are bought into the vision of the company, asking more about success helps you understand where the company’s going and may hint at what opportunities lie ahead.
What are some current or upcoming challenges the company may face? For example, what types of things are falling through the cracks? Where is the slowness in the business? Pay special attention to this section because in theory, you’d be hired to help sort out some of these issues.
Who’s at the company today? What types of roles already exist at the company? What departments or functions? Importantly — what types of roles are missing? Could you plausibly fill in the gaps?

2. Think through your unique set of skills and experiences and how they may fit into the current organization.

This is the fun part — where you take inventory of your lived experiences and skills (sometimes a smorgasbord of various roles in differing domains) and think through how they may apply at a particular company.

As David Epstein, author of Range, said, “Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.” What pattern recognition can you apply to this company’s challenges? What similar, interesting problems have you solved before, albeit in a different context?

In my own case, I knew that my prior early-stage startup experiences would help us do similar things at Abridge (and avoid painful mistakes made the first time around). But even at my first startup job, I was able to think through how skills from disparate professional experiences and personal hobbies may fit into existing company needs. For example, I knew my ad sales experience would come handy when we wanted to launch our first AdWords campaign on the cheap. My side hobby as a professional wedding photographer and putting together a WordPress site would come in handy when it was time to create our website. And my experience in general problem-solving would come in handy when on day 1 our website went down, shortly before I had to also provide IT support because our printer was spitting out paper and broke. (I remember my co-founder looking at me when this all happened and saying, “Well, welcome to life at a startup!” 😂

3. Paint a compelling future for the company with you in it. How might you accelerate the company’s efforts?

In making your pitch, the most important thing is to be specific and clear on what you can do for the company. How might you create or level-up existing systems and processes to make things run smoother/faster/better?

As Chloe Yoo, Head of Ops and Finance at HumanFirst said, “As an operator, I can both build and run. This is crucial for early stage startups where the needs of the company change rapidly.” Chloe goes on to say, “A strong generalist will always be a good hire — this gives orgs flexibility when it comes to building out specific functions that come with scale like sales, marketing, and customer experience).”

And beyond the above, there are so many other ways that an operator / generalist can provide value to a company. For example:

Startups are full of unknowns. A kickass operator can help companies quickly validate various assumptions, strategies, and tactics, before building out a more specialized team to do them.
A generalist can fill in any temporary gaps in the company, whether it’s due to staffing changes, headcount restrictions, or starting a new department.
Operators make things happen. They synthesize information, easily context switch, and help people prioritize the work. The best operators I know are hustlers who are efficiency-minded, flexible, and above all — persistent doers.
An operator with broad exposure to a variety of functions can help startups avoid making costly mistakes early on. Generalists will have a better sense of how various functions work independently, as well as how they can work together to improve the chance of success.
An operator improves everyone’s lives. They are the glue in the company that holds people together, helps problem solve, and creates processes out of chaos.

The email that landed me my job

Putting it all together, here’s the email I sent to the Abridge CEO in 2019 as my own pitch to create an ops role at the company:

Hey Shiv,

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Abridge since we met earlier in the week. I think you guys have a great opportunity here. After reflecting on the supplemental material some more, I think you would benefit substantially from bringing on an ops person sooner rather than later. At the risk of sounding too forward, I think that person should be me. :)

Based on my own experiences bringing several new products to market, I think you’ll face a number of operational challenges as you launch your app:

User acquisition and marketing: As you're first starting out, it will be important to have a passionate base of initial beta testers. I see in your roadmap that Q1 is for branding, but I’m not convinced that branding is the best move for initial user acquisition. In the early days, you’ll probably have a ton of feedback that will inform product development. Branding can come later, when you’ve found product-market fit and you’re ready to scale. For now, I think it’s crucial to figure out how to best reach these initial users through a variety of extremely targeted SEM, SEO, and maybe even high-touch points (e.g. in-person through doctors’ offices). You’ll also want to build up your website content and really tell your story.
Product strategy: The purpose of a seed round is to maximize your learning per dollar by setting parameters for success/failure, testing hypotheses as quickly as possible, and pivoting when you haven’t found product-market fit. Your whitepaper is impressive in terms of the technical approach; however, you’ll want to figure out a structured way to iterate quickly on an MVP and ensure it’s the right product-market fit before investing too many resources in perfecting your algorithms and scaling the product.
Account management / customer support / user studies <> development cycle: As with any product, there will be bugs, questions, and frustrated users. Who will manage these relationships, delight your initial users, and escalate feedback to the product/dev team? You’ll need to have amazing customer support so you can transform your initial customers into early advocates who will scale your product via word of mouth.
Project management: As you grow the team across different functions, project coordination will become more vital in reaching milestones / launch dates. How will you track your launch plan and make sure people have the resources necessary to meet their deliverables on time?
The other million things you need to get done but don’t have time to as a founder: building your culture, hiring and managing contractors, evaluating software solutions, creating TOS, figuring out internal feedback mechanisms, managing your community of users, dealing with HR/benefits/accounting/taxes, office manager responsibilities, etc.

Here’s my pitch: I’m the ideal person to help you with all of the above and more. I’ve built a company from scratch at Binti and scaled efficient practices at Google. I’m scrappy, I love wearing many hats and navigating ambiguity, and most importantly, I get shit done. I think you’re on to a great idea, and suffice it to say that talking with you about Abridge has me far more excited than going the comfortable route of taking another job at Google.

In terms of next steps, I’d love to set up a co-working day, where I come in and work with you all on some project to see if there’s a good mutual fit. I’ve also attached my resume for more detail on my work experiences.

Final thoughts

It can be easy to underestimate your worth as a generalist, especially in a world where specialized skills are lauded. However, being a generalist operator IS an incredible skillset in and of itself, and your problem-solving, can-do attitude will be an incredible asset for any company. Flex it! 💪

If you have other tips on how you’ve successfully pitched your value as a generalist, I’d love to hear them👇

dreamer//doer

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