There are benefits from specialization, e.g., less time to learn and quicker improvements, as a result of focusing on one skill. But what are the limits? How specialized can a role get? One such limit would be a threshold whereby certain synergies are given up by limiting a role too far.
For example, an insurance company wants to write a policy for a big client. The underwriter prices the risk. The salesman takes it to the client. Client says the premium is too high. Salesman goes back to the underwriter and says the premium is too high.
The salesman on his own doesn’t have knowledge of how the premium was calculated in order to have accurate price negotiations. But what if the underwriter were also the salesman? And he knew that he baked a 5% additional profit margin into the premium. If he were also a talented salesman, maybe he could negotiate with the client to decrease the premium by 3% while still maintaining a 2% additional margin for the company and still winning the big account.
Or, consider customer support and product development. If an angry customer calls in to complain about a very specific part of the product that the customer support person isn’t familiar with, then the customer support person has to put the customer on hold and call someone more knowledgeable about the product. But what if the person taking the customer support calls was the same person that built the product?
It’s easy to see the onboarding costs (longer learning curve, more learning materials) and frictions (switching between different tasks, not getting into flow state) from allowing too much bandwidth for any one role.
Sometimes these costs might be worth building certain “hybrid” roles in your org where individuals act as bridges between two departments that should be talking more than they are.