Skill Stacking for Organizational Influence

Why the best skill stacks transform organizations, not just careers

Most people build skill stacks for themselves, but they’re doing it wrong.

I’ll tell you why. I used to be one of them.

A year ago, I was just the “forms guy” at an 800+ person company. I’d spent two years deliberately building my skill stack: technical fluency + product sense + customer discovery. Classic progression for a Product Manager.

People loved my work. Leadership praised my insights. I was making an impact.

But I kept hitting the same wall.

Our clients would have problems with their work authorization, escalate it up to leadership, and they’d have me work to resolve the current issues with our partners.

I’d tell them we needed a new solution, leadership would nod, then… nothing would change.

The turning point came when I presented a gap analysis of our product, detailing exactly what we needed to do to built our own product.

My boss said, “Great! Can you put together a deck showing the broader impact pursuing this will have?”

I realized in that moment I'd optimized for the wrong outcome. I was building skills to be better as an individual, not to drive organizational change.

So instead of doubling down on technical depth, I started building what felt like the "wrong" combination: product sense + legal understanding + narrative building.

That experience taught me something most people miss about skill stacks:

They think it's about personal growth. Career advancement. Individual excellence.

But they're missing the real game.

The “A players” understand your skill stack isn’t about becoming better at your job, it’s about fundamentally expanding what your entire organizations can do.

Skill Intersections

Conventional wisdom tells you to stack complementary skills. Coding + design. Finance + storytelling. Technical + creative.

That's table stakes.

The real opportunity is identifying skill intersections that expand organizations capabilities. Not just what you can do, but what your entire company can suddenly attempt.

Look at Max Levchin (PayPal co-founder).

His unique combination of security expertise and software development for handheld devices wasn't just scarce skills in the 1990s.¹ It was a transformative skill stack.

Source: Occupations in Information Technology

Just being in IT put him in the top 1% at that time. No one else was capable of both writing software for handheld devices and the cybersecurity necessary for financial transactions. These weren’t even formal fields, it was all just IT back then.

He described it as "sort of an art and science unto its own."

Levchin's vision wasn't small. He saw enterprises using handheld devices as primary communication. While everyone avoided the growing complexity of cryptographic operations, Levchin reverse-engineered what existed.

His hypothesis wasn't about personal advancement. That specific skill intersection didn't just make him valuable. It made PayPal possible.

Without that precise combination, the company couldn't exist.

Become The Skill Bridge

How do you become this person? Three steps: