In the past couple of years, I’ve found myself roles that are defined by their lack of definition. It’s the kind of role that lets you add value in ways that don’t fit neatly into tech’s boxes, where there’s room for more undirectedness and using your curiosity as a battering ram. Depending on where you’re working, the role will probably come with one of these titles: Chief of Staff (that's me), Entrepreneur in Residence, Founder’s Office, and so on. But I like to think of it agnostic of titles, as an “amoeba” role.

I do want to call out early on that an amoeba role can be confused with a jack of all trades. But the more I explore this role, the more I realise it's something different.

Your garden variety Jack might have surface-level knowledge across many areas, but often lacks the depth to tackle complex challenges in any one area. This versatility is their strength, but can also be their limitation. I think the key difference lies in our ability to not just do many things, but to rapidly dive deep—and fast—into whatever the situation demands. A jack of all trades might have no speciality, but in an amoeba role, being a generalist is your specialty. Not "I can do a bit of everything", but "I can become what the team needs most right now".

Being Frankenstein

The heart of an amoeba role, I think, is the meta skill of deep, rapid adaptation. It’s less about applying known skills to new situations and more about developing entirely new approaches on the fly, often by combining insights from disparate domains. I think that, to really ace that, you have to have an uncanny ability to assess a situation, recognise patterns, identify what it needs, and Frankenstein together the right mix of skills, tools and people to solve it — often within a few days, if not hours.

The longer I inhabit this role, the more I realise just how far it can stretch. When you’re intentionally not boxed in by a rigid job description, you can be doing tactical work like fine-tuning a presentation one day, and strategic work like laying down the roadmap for a new internal product the next. You can find yourself in any meeting room at any time, driven there simply because it was interesting and your leaders thought it needed a boost. Very early on, I found myself helming projects that, on paper, I had no business running. If you’re soft-spoken like me, it’s an intimidating position to be in...

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