When people talk about career growth, they usually focus on titles, pay bumps, and how many direct reports they can stack like Pokémon cards. But in Agile, real growth looks a little different. It’s not about collecting badges. It’s about reshaping how you work with others.
Let’s talk skill shapes.
The Basics: I, T, and M
I-Shaped People
- Specialists. Experts. Go-to gurus in their field.
- The person you Slack when something’s broken and only they can fix it.
- Great depth, not so great at collaboration.
Think: “I do backend and only backend. Don’t ask me about front-end. Or testing. Or meetings. Especially meetings.”
T-Shaped People
- Deep expertise in one area and a broad understanding of others.
- The teammate who can code, test, and still explain things to a marketing person without using a whiteboard and a prayer.
Think: “I lead dev, but I get UX, I can test, and I’ve run standups without panicking.”
M-Shaped People
- Deep expertise in multiple areas with broad skills across the board.
- Your Swiss Army knife. Strategy, ops, facilitation, tech fluency, maybe even a killer spreadsheet game.
Think: “I helped launch the product, optimize the org structure, coach the exec team, and still made time for a coffee chat that actually mattered.”
Why This Matters in Agile
Agile thrives on adaptability. It punishes silos and rewards flow. If your team is full of I-shaped people, you’re going to need a lot of handoffs. And every handoff is a risk of delay, confusion, or “Oh I thought they were doing that.”
T-shaped people reduce handoffs. They increase optionality. They make Agile teams work.
M-shaped people? They see the system. They lead change. They build bridges and reroute traffic when everyone else is standing in a daily asking, “Wait, what are we even doing again?”
The Real Problem: You’ve Got Too Many I’s on the Team
If your Agile transformation is stuck, check your skill shape distribution.
Too many I’s and you get:
- Over-reliance on experts
- Bottlenecks that no retrospective fixes
- Turf wars masked as “role clarity”
- And enough “that’s not my job” moments to make HR twitch
Agile doesn’t break because Scrum is flawed. It breaks because your team is built like a row of bowling pins, standing straight, unable to support each other, and easily knocked over.
Skill Shapes Evolve
Here’s the good news: You’re not born with a skill shape. You build it.
- You start I-shaped. That’s how careers begin. Learn one thing. Get good at it.
- In a healthy Agile team, you stretch horizontally. You start pairing, shadowing, learning just enough to be dangerous in other areas. You become T-shaped.
- Over time, if you lean into curiosity and systems thinking, you build multiple spikes of depth. You become M-shaped, whether your title says “leader” or not.
Being M-shaped doesn’t mean doing everything. It means seeing more, flexing smarter, and knowing when to step in and when to back off.
Final Thought
Shape matters. But shape is also stretchable.
Agile isn’t just about frameworks. It’s about people who are willing to evolve, who aren’t afraid to step outside their lane, lend a hand, ask a question, or rethink the whole thing.
So take a look at your own shape. And if you’re still I-shaped?
Stretch.
You’ll be amazed at what gets unlocked when you do.
