The thing I wasn’t expecting was how it felt to be near one of them.
You know the type.
At every company there’s at least one or two people everyone quietly routes impossible problems toward.
They usually went by a tag or nickname.
Or if there were multiples of a name, they had dibs. The Sarah—not Sarah J, Sarah Anderson, Sara-with-no-h. (Iykyk).
“Put maximus on this.”
“Ask cruz.”
“d-tims probably knows.”
They never said much in meetings.
Then an hour later they’d come back with a whole end-to-end solution, while the rest of us were still debating edge cases and Jira tickets.
Some of them don’t even show their faces in meetings anymore.
Just an avatar photo of a manga character or really niche internet reference.
Dialed in from a cryptic number. Bangkok or Budapest, Taipei or Tokyo, maybe some small town in Portugal.
Somehow, HR always finds a way to accommodate their work exceptions.
They solve problems in the same amount of time the rest of the team argues over pragmatics, dogma, or simply unchecked low blood sugar.
That’s why they survive every round of layoffs, and get first dibs at all the gnarly projects.
At manager meetings, we’d flag their flight risk first. (People don’t like to hear that part).
Across the thousands of 1:1s I’ve had in my career, they always talked differently.
“First, you have to see the world around you. Then, you break it into components, build and rebuild it.” That’s what one such builder type (a designer who could code) would tell me, from time to time.
We’d get into the weeds about how that translated into soft corners or “pillows” in their card designs.
A brutalist attitude towards shipping. Persnickety about team health, code hygiene, ship pace, research, data, too.
Never did care for company politics or titles.
“It’s in the reps,” a pm who did backend used to say, “we gotta get more reps in.” They were known for shipping hard to ship features (something I got to witness across three different hypergrowth environments).
Sometimes they’d adamantly ship something random, “just to get a feel for what we’re working with.”
An infinite game doesn’t always mean thriving.
There are winters, too.
Somehow even a bad project, under their watch, eventually led to a bright spring breakthrough.
The high of seeing your product connect with the world.
There is no greater feeling, truly.
In a previous era, we called them “full stack engineers”
or “designers who can code” or “mixed methods researchers” or “pms with eng backgrounds” etc…
When I built Slack’s original survey layer, for measuring CSAT, NPS, and a battery of other sentiment scores, I had to break everything I knew about surveys and recombine it in ways that were just right for Slack.
In the end, it was faster, better, cheaper, higher ROI, than any other survey program I knew of.
An eng leader taught me how to tackle it. She turned technical frameworks into basketball metaphors.
Thanks to her, I became a researcher who understood eng concepts, which ultimately helped me scale.
For instance, I used to worry about every possible risk that might hit my surveys: What if the CEO wants to see this, given this change in macro affairs? What if the Sales team needs an extra cut at the company level?
I leveraged my anxiety to anticipate stakeholder concerns.
It worked well for a while.
Over time, this compounded into generalized anxiety-as-a-personality. Woof.
“You can’t be at the center of all those checks… it’ll fuck with your jump shot.”
Once I understood how to design survey systems, including checks and balances, I was no longer using something negative to fuel my practice.
I could play better infinite games after.
Freed up my mindspace.
Another time I needed to code a survey from scratch.
The focus ring code was killing me.
Literally crashing out over code and pixels, yuck.
I called on my very capable eng husband (who also writes and designs).
I was like, “I guess we won’t have focus rings.” and he was like, “wait a minute, have you truly exhausted all possibilities before pushing it back to design?”
I had never thought of it that way.
Until then, pushing wasn’t about some objective goal.
The boundary was when I’d crash out.
It was interesting to learn that sometimes you work through a crash out.
Crash outs are to be expected, on the path to building. (What is it they say about cracked egg and omelettes?)
Birthing code into experience. It’s gonna cost a pound of something.
He suggested we go for a walk. Have some tea. Come back to it later.
“The mind needs space to solve hard problems.”
True to form, a solution came for the focus rings code.
(Not that it matters, but my first ever soup-to-nuts survey was a hit. I went a lot further than focus rings after that day.)
These days, we call them Superbuilders.
Folks who spike in 1-3 areas, and then round out their abilities/scope with a really expert grasp of AI.
Ceteris paribus, give them an hour, you’ll see a person replace a full department’s quarter’s roadmap in a week… and still have time to live a good quality life.
There were a nontrivial number of them at my previous job.
They could ship faster than I could make a counterargument.
When you can ship as fast as you can think, do you really think you can’t cover all concerns before the weekend?
It blew my skepticism away.
Chefs cook in real time.
Finally, software development can feel as alive as cooking.
One such person, let’s call them ‘maximus’ was particularly cool and easy to work with.
I loved being around them.
“Oh whoops! Let me check that again” before anyone could be annoyed with a bug, he’d fix it.
He reminded me that being fast is an advantage.
Another, ‘Joe,’ loved to talk about his AI workflows and tool stack.
“You wanna play around with them and break them, so you know what to use and when… Like, I prefer [djafldfa] and [xdslkf]. And then, I do the real work after [afaefa] hits a wall.”
He’d never been a people manager, but I immediately could relate it to roadmapping and resource allocation. Everyone on my team was a researcher, ofc, but it still mattered which person was paired to which project.
Every week, we’d share notes, about people management vs AI tool management, and the new stuff we were playing around with.
Thanks to them, I have gone farther than I ever have:
My own 90’s fever dream research website (not UI friendly at all, whoopsie). And, this little site (which I wanted to animate like water movements).
When two buddies wanted help pulling together a pov, I cooked this repo & lit review up in two hours.
I’ve also run studies faster than I ever dreamed: 12 projects in 3 weeks, while prioritizing a family emergency and some travel, too.
My new approach is to keep the pace extremely fast, and see if I can just get better rep after rep, optimizing my human judgement for the good, important, and fun stuff.
Like, this was one of my first posters. And this is my most recent one. (I think I’m figuring out a rhythm to AI-mod studies and reporting them…)
And, it’s the most accessible it’s been.
My Superbuilder counterparts can share a snippet of their most helpful prompts, and tool preferences (granola + claude came up a few times), and poof, I’d be 100x further along in my thinking and project.
No metaphors. No diagrams. No skill translations.
And I can’t help but appreciate how much easier this generation of tools are for learning from a Superbuilder…
And becoming one, too…
What are other superbuilders out there doing these days?
And, do my observations resonate? I prefer to keep it observational vs. roll into some generalized theory.
What are your observations?
Tell me!
I’ve been waiting to hear from you 🫶🖖🤘✌️
