The environment that made me
At one point in my career, I had six weeks to find a job — or I would be kicked out of the country.
Not laid off. Not in transition. Kicked out. My visa status depended on employment, and the clock was running. There was no safety net, no fallback plan, no luxury of being selective.
So I did whatever it took. I learned tools I'd never touched. I pitched work I wasn't fully qualified for. I was open to projects that crossed every functional line: design, product, strategy, go-to-market. Because the alternative was leaving. And I talked to people. Anyone who could get me there.
What I didn't realize at the time was that this pressure was building something. Not just skills. A shape.
The hustle that immigrants carry, that specific blend of adaptability, resourcefulness, and refusal to give up, it doesn't come from ambition alone. It comes from necessity. From environments that demand you become more than your job title.
In a moment when immigrants are being questioned and scrutinized, I want to say this clearly: some of the most X-shaped people I know learned to operate this way because they had no other option. And what they built, for themselves, for their teams, for their industries, is extraordinary.
Necessity is a brutal teacher. It is also one of the best.
Someone at a recent talk asked me: "How do you actually become an X-shaped person?"
It's the right question. And I've thought hard about it. The answer isn't clear, nor is it easy.
You don't become X-shaped by reading about it. You don't become X-shaped because your manager sent you to a workshop or your company rolled out a new competency framework. You become X-shaped by being thrown into a situation where you have no choice but to figure it out. And then figuring it out anyway.
It's only through the act of doing that you become.
X-shaped can't be taught. But it can be triggered.
Let me be direct about something: you cannot teach someone to be X-shaped the way you teach them Figma or SQL.
It's not a skill set. It's a posture toward problems, toward uncertainty, toward other disciplines. It's the audacity to ask should we be building this? when everyone else is asking how do we build this? It's moving at 70% confidence because waiting for 95% means someone else ships first.
That posture comes from doing things that scare you, in environments that hold you accountable for the outcome. And where that outcome is directly tied to your worth, and your ability to provide for those you love.
Which means the question isn't "How do I teach someone to be X-shaped?" The question is "What environment forces someone to find out what they're capable of?"
The shift happening in teams right now
Here's what I'm watching across the startups and design teams I work with.
The old structure, one person per function, specialists in their lane, handoffs between silos, is cracking. Not disappearing. Cracking.
AI is executing the repeatable parts of every discipline faster and cheaper than any individual specialist can. What's left is the creative problem solving, the cross-functional relationships, the trust to ask "should we even be doing this?" That's the work that requires someone who can see the whole board.
This is creating a new tension in teams. You don't need five people doing five versions of the same thing. But you do still need depth. The IC vs. manager path isn't going away. Not everyone wants to be cross-functional, and that's not a failure. Some of the most valuable people on a team are the ones who go impossibly deep in one area.
The question isn't X-shaped versus T-shaped. They are: as an individual, do you know which you're building toward, and as a company, are you creating the conditions for both to thrive?
What X-shaped people actually need to emerge
If you're an individual reading this, a designer, a creative, a displaced professional, someone who feels the pull toward more than your current lane, here's what I want you to hear.
Don't wait for your team to develop you into this. That's not how it works.
Your organization will not hand you a cross-functional remit. Your manager will not assign you the experience of seeing a problem in 3D. You have to reach for that yourself.
Through side projects.
Through saying yes to the thing you're not fully qualified for.
Through being the person who asks the business question in a room full of people talking about pixels. Through asking for help.
Through opening Claude and prototyping that thing you've been thinking about for years.
The doing is the becoming.
Every time you ship something with your name on it, something you built outside the safety of the team credit, you find out a little more about what you're made of. God knows I have started (and failed) more of my own side projects than I can count. Such is the nature of learning, and experimenting, and I hope you'll have fun.
Start there.
What leaders need to build
If you're a team leader, a founder, a design director, the burden isn't just hiring. It's environment design.
X-shaped people don't thrive everywhere. They burn out in structures that punish cross-functional curiosity. They leave when their work becomes invisible. They get crushed in territorial cultures where every function is protecting its lane.
If you want X-shaped people to emerge and stay, you need four things.
Autonomy. Give them a real problem and get out of the way. Not a task. A problem with stakes attached.
Accountability. Hold them to outcomes, not outputs. X-shaped people need to feel the weight of consequence. That's what focuses and gives clarity.
Championship. Someone senior needs to see the work and say this matters. X-shaped contributions are easy to dismiss as "busy work" because they don't fit neatly into any one department's metrics. A champion makes it visible.
Protection. Territorial war is the natural predator of X-shaped people. When someone is operating across functions, someone will feel threatened. Your job as a leader is to name what they're doing, why it matters, and protect the space for it to continue.
One more thing: you don't need a team made entirely of X-shaped people. That's not a team, it's a beautiful chaos. You need a few, maybe two or three depending on team size, who can see across the whole system, combined with specialists who go deep. The X-shaped person's job isn't to do everyone's work. It's to catch the things that fall between the lanes.
The shape is made in the doing
Whether you're the individual wondering if you have what it takes, or the leader trying to build a team that can navigate what's coming, the answer is the same.
Create the conditions. Take the leap. Do the thing you're not fully ready for.
You don't think your way into becoming. You don't team your way into it either.
You do you.
This is Part 2 of an ongoing series on X-shaped people and the future of creative teams. Read Part 1: The X-Shaped Individual: Solving for Problems in 3D
Thu Do is a hands-on product owner with 10+ years bringing products from 0-to-1 across startups, Fortune 500 consultancies (BCG, PwC), and innovation studios. She helps early-stage to early-growth companies ($1-10M ARR) and innovation teams turn big visions into competitive market-ready products and services through human-centered design, product alignment, and AI innovation. This article originally appeared on Thu's Tech Dialect. Find her on LinkedIn.
Co-created with Claude