The Pi-Shaped Developer: Why One Deep Skill Is No Longer Enough
TL;DR: T-shaped (one deep skill + broad knowledge) was great advice. It's now incomplete. AI is commoditizing code production, and developers who only go deep in technical implementation are competing against tools that improve every month. The Pi-shaped model—two deep, compounding skills connected by a broad base—is what differentiates you now. My own version: business and sales paired with software engineering.
For years, we've talked about T-shaped developers: go deep in one area, stay broadly familiar across many. It was great advice. It's now incomplete.
If you're building a career as a developer in 2026 and beyond, you need to think about becoming Pi-shaped: two deep areas of expertise connected by a broad base of general knowledge.
Code Production Is Becoming Table Stakes
The T-shaped model emerged when deep technical specialization was rare and valuable. Being the person who really understood database internals was enough to build an entire career.
That world is changing fast. AI coding assistants already handle the "write me a React component that does X" tasks that used to require junior developers. They're getting better every month.
Developers aren't obsolete—far from it. But code production alone is no longer the differentiator it once was. If your only deep skill is "I write code," you're competing against an ever-improving army of AI tools that work 24/7.
The Pi-Shaped Model
The T-shaped model says: be broad, go deep in one thing.
The Pi-shaped model says: be broad, go deep in two things—and make sure those two things compound together.
That second leg isn't just "another skill." It's a multiplier:
- Backend Engineer + Data Analytics: You design systems that answer the questions the business actually needs answered.
- Frontend Developer + UX Research: You advocate for changes based on evidence, not opinion.
- Platform Engineer + Security: You build infrastructure secure by default and articulate risk tradeoffs to leadership.
- Full-Stack Developer + Domain Expertise: You understand the regulatory landscape and the actual problems practitioners face.
The second skill doesn't replace the first. It makes it dramatically more valuable.
Why I Went Deep on Business
This is personal for me. I learned to code as a kid, but when it came time for university I chose to study business. Not because I lost interest in technology—but because I sensed that understanding how companies work would make me a better builder. My 2025 reading list reflects that same instinct years later: 15 business and leadership books, 5 on sales—Spin Selling, Selling the Cloud, Zero to One, The Private Equity Playbook. That investment in the business side has been deliberate and ongoing.
The combination has been a multiplier. When I'm building software, I'm not just thinking about clean architecture—I'm thinking about which features drive revenue, how the product fits the market, and what tradeoffs make sense commercially. When I'm in a sales or strategy conversation, I can speak credibly about what's technically feasible, what's expensive, and where the real engineering risk lives.
Gergely Orosz calls this the "Product-Minded Software Engineer"—developers who ask why they're building something, not just how. But business and sales is just one option. There are many second depths that compound with engineering:
- UX design — you stop throwing designs over the wall and start shipping interfaces informed by real user behavior and usability principles.
- Data analysis — you don't just instrument events; you derive insights that shape the roadmap and prove (or disprove) product hypotheses.
- Product management — you translate between customer problems and technical solutions, cutting the feedback loop from weeks to hours.
- Technical writing — you create documentation, API references, and developer experience that turns a good tool into an adopted one.
The point is that you need something beyond code that compounds with your technical ability.
The Plateau Problem
There's a practical reason beyond career strategy. Learning curves are steep at first, then flatten. Your first two years as a developer are full of rapid growth. Your tenth? The improvements are marginal.
That extra 5% improvement in your primary skill might take a year. You could spend that same year getting to 70% competency in a complementary skill—and that 70% might be more valuable than the 5% ever could be.
The Pi shape lets you restart the rapid-growth phase without abandoning your existing expertise.
Choosing Your Second Depth
Look for natural adjacencies. Close enough to benefit from your existing context, different enough to open new conversations.
Follow your curiosity. The skills you'll actually develop are the ones you find interesting enough to pursue outside work hours.
Consider where value is created. The most valuable combinations connect implementation to business outcomes—product sense, customer understanding, commercial awareness.
Think about what's hard to automate. AI will get very good at generating code. It will have a harder time with ambiguous problems, cross-functional collaboration, and navigating human relationships.
The Inflection Point
The developers who thrive in the next decade won't write the most code. They'll leverage AI tools to amplify their output while contributing something uniquely human: judgment, context, relationships, and cross-domain insight.
The Pi-shaped developer can take a 10x improvement in code generation and turn it into a 10x improvement in business outcomes—because they understand the business, not just the code.
The T-shape was good advice for the previous era. The Pi-shape is the model for what comes next.