I’ve seen this in various forms over the years and agree… to a point. But how do you as a Solution Engineer know when to focus on strengths vs weakness? Below is a framework based on a very deep dive with over 140 sources. I distilled it 1000 words. For TL;DR see “A Framework for MOAR Revenue Impact”
A seven-foot-two basketball player stands at the free-throw line. He has a shot no defender can block. The sky hook. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar used this single move to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer for four decades.
Meanwhile, a young Greek orator can barely speak. He stutters. His breath is short. Audiences laugh at him. Demosthenes doesn’t accept this. He puts pebbles in his mouth. He shouts over ocean waves. He practices in front of mirrors for hours. He becomes the greatest orator of ancient Athens.
Two paths. Both led to mastery. One amplified a natural gift. The other confronted a crippling flaw.
As a solution engineer, you face this choice constantly. Should you deepen your expertise in cloud architecture? Or finally master financial modeling for ROI discussions? Should you lean into your strength at whiteboarding complex systems? Or fix your weakness in executive communication?
The answer isn’t binary. It’s strategic.
The Case for Specialization: Your Differentiator in a Crowded Market
Think about your last deal that launched. Chances are you didn’t win because you were mediocre at everything. You won because you were exceptional at something specific. Maybe you translated technical complexity into business value better than anyone else. Maybe you designed multi-cloud architectures that competitors couldn’t match. Maybe you asked discovery questions that uncovered problems the customer didn’t know they had.
Aristotle called it eudaimonia. Human flourishing. He believed we achieve it by exercising our highest virtues. Our signature strengths.
Modern science confirms this. People who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be engaged at work. They’re three times more likely to report excellent quality of life.
Peter Drucker formalized this into management theory. Organizations should make individual strengths effective and individual weaknesses irrelevant.
The data backs him up. Companies that adopt strengths-based cultures see nineteen percent higher sales. Twenty-nine percent more profit. Seventy-two percent less turnover.
Economics offers a model. Comparative advantage. Even if you’re the best technical architect and the best at pricing models on your team, you should still focus on architecture if that’s where you create the most value. Why? Because the opportunity cost of you building spreadsheets is the high-value architecture work you’re not doing.
Apply this to your SE career. Your team achieves peak performance when members specialize in unique strengths and collaborate to cover gaps. One SE masters Kubernetes migrations. Another owns security compliance. Another excels at building executive demos. Together you’re unbeatable. Separately you’d be average generalists.
In sports, legends are built on perfection of single skills. Mariano Rivera threw one pitch. The cut fastball. Batters knew it was coming. They still couldn’t hit it. He became the most dominant closer in baseball history.
Your signature move as an SE might be your ability to design reference architectures in real-time during customer calls. Or your knack for identifying technical debt that becomes a business case for migration. Or your talent for translating vague business problems into concrete technical requirements.
In science, the Renaissance man is extinct. The paper announcing the human genome sequence had over a thousand authors. Progress happens through armies of specialists. Each a master of a narrow domain.
Better to master one essential skill than to be mediocre at many.
The Counter-Case: When Technical Brilliance Loses Deals
But this approach is incomplete.
You’ve seen it happen. The brilliant SE who designs perfect architectures but can’t communicate value to a CFO. The deal stalls. The competitor wins with a technically inferior solution but superior business justification.
Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset challenges the idea that abilities are fixed. A growth mindset sees weakness as opportunity. Not permanent deficiency.
Angela Duckworth found that grit matters more than raw talent. In her formula, effort counts twice. Once to build skill. Again to produce results.
Not all weaknesses deserve equal attention. The key is triage.
An irrelevant weakness doesn’t matter. An SE who excels at enterprise architecture but struggles with front-end JavaScript can ignore that gap. Stay in your lane. Design backends. Let specialists handle the UI.
A limiting weakness holds you back. An SE with deep technical knowledge but terrible discovery skills will miss the real problem. They’ll design the wrong solution. The customer won’t buy. Or worse, they’ll buy and fail to get value. That SE’s technical strength becomes worthless because the limiting weakness prevents them from understanding what to build.
A fatal flaw destroys everything. No amount of strength compensates.
Consider corporate pivots. Netflix started mailing DVDs. Their fatal flaw was dependence on physical media in a digital world. They pivoted to streaming. Then they saw a new threat. Studios who licensed them content were becoming competitors. They pivoted again. They became content creators. Netflix survived by confronting weaknesses, not ignoring them.
In SE terms, imagine being the best on-premise infrastructure expert in 2015. That was a fatal flaw disguised as a strength. The market was moving to cloud. SEs who didn’t pivot became less relevant.
Slack began as a failed video game called Glitch. The fatal flaw was simple: not enough people wanted to play it. But the team had built a powerful internal chat tool. They abandoned the game. They rebuilt around the communication tool.
Sometimes in discovery, you realize the customer’s stated problem is a distraction. The real problem is something else entirely. The best SEs recognize this. They pivot the conversation. They solve the right problem.
The grasshopper in Aesop’s fable was a master musician. He spent summer making beautiful music. The ant worked gathering food. When winter came, the grasshopper starved. His strength was magnificent. His fatal flaw killed him.
An SE who only does technical work and never learns the business side is the grasshopper. When budget season comes, they can’t justify their existence. They can’t connect technical solutions to revenue impact or cost savings. They starve.
The parallel for SEs is clear. You might be brilliant at solution design. But if a competitor can ask better questions, understand stakeholder politics, or quantify business value more clearly, you lose. The complete SE addresses exploitable gaps.
A Framework for MOAR Revenue Impact
Success in our line of work requires identifying your weaknesses and strengths and determining where to spend your self investment.
Think of weaknesses in four categories:
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Irrelevant weaknesses can be ignored. Design roles around them. The SE who can’t code in Python but excels at infrastructure architecture shouldn’t be forced into development bootcamps. Structure deals so they do what they do best.
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Remediable weaknesses limit performance but can improve with effort. These deserve the twenty percent of development time reserved for shoring up critical gaps. The SE who struggles with executive communication but has deep technical skills should invest here. Not to become a keynote speaker. Just to reach sufficiency. To stop losing deals because they can’t explain TCO to a VP of Finance.
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Fatal flaws threaten survival. These demand immediate attention. The SE who can’t discover customer problems will fail regardless of technical prowess. The SE who designs solutions customers can’t afford will consistently miss quota. The SE who ignores security requirements will torpedo deals in regulated industries. Address these first or nothing else matters.
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Misunderstood strengths appear as weaknesses in the wrong context. The ugly duckling wasn’t a defective duck. He was a swan in the wrong pond. The solution isn’t remediation. It’s realignment.
- Maybe you’re told you ask too many questions in discovery. You slow down deals. But make the move to complex enterprise sales where thorough discovery is the difference between a successful implementation and a failed one. Suddenly your “weakness” is your most valuable trait.
This leads to four developmental pathways:
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Amplify your strengths. This is where eighty percent of your energy goes. It’s the only path to mastery. If you’re exceptional at designing migration strategies, become the absolute best. Build reference architectures. Create repeatable frameworks. Turn your strength into intellectual property that wins deals competitors can’t touch.
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Remediate critical weaknesses. Not to achieve excellence but to reach sufficiency. To prevent derailment. If you can’t present to executives, you don’t need to become a TED speaker. You need to reach the point where you don’t lose deals because of it. Learn the frameworks. Practice the structure. Get to good-enough.
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Compensate for weaknesses you can’t or shouldn’t fix directly. Use a different strength to work around the gap. Like the tortoise vs the hare - using a tortoise-like persistence to overcome lack of speed.
- If you’re not great at real-time whiteboarding, compensate by preparing exceptional architecture diagrams in advance. If you struggle with pricing conversations, compensate by building financial models beforehand that do the talking for you.
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Realign when you’re in the wrong environment. Find the pond where your nature is an asset, not a liability.
- If you’re deeply technical but your company wants SEs who are really sales generalists, find a company that values technical depth. If you excel at strategic enterprise architecture but you’re in a transactional SMB sales environment, do what you need to do to realign to enterprise. If you love building proofs of concept but your role is mostly slideshows, find a role that values hands-on technical work.
The principle is asymmetric investment. Eighty percent of resources amplify strength. Twenty percent manage critical weaknesses.
Key Takeaways for Solution Engineers
1. Default to amplification. Spend most of your energy turning natural talents into world-class strengths. If you’re exceptional at multi-cloud architecture, become the recognized expert. Create frameworks. Build demonstrations. Make it your signature. This is the primary path to becoming the SE customers request by name.
2. Triage your weaknesses. Not all gaps matter equally. Distinguish between irrelevant quirks and fatal flaws. Can’t code in every language? Irrelevant. Can’t articulate ROI to c-suite buyers? Fatal. Ignore the former. Attack the latter with urgency.
3. Context determines strategy. The same trait can be a strength in one environment and a weakness in another. Deep technical dives might be a strength in complex enterprise deals and a weakness in fast-moving SMB sales. Sometimes the answer isn’t to change yourself but to change your territory, your vertical, or company.
4. Build the meta-skill of judgment. The ability to diagnose situations accurately and select the right developmental pathway is more valuable than any specific talent. This applies to your own development and to customer discovery. The SE who can accurately diagnose whether a customer objection is irrelevant, remediable, fatal, or misunderstood will win more deals than the SE with slightly better technical skills.
5. Protect against catastrophic failure first. No amount of excellence in one area compensates for a weakness that can sink the entire enterprise. You might design the most elegant architecture ever conceived. But if you can’t discover the real business problem, or you ignore security requirements, or you design something the customer can’t afford, you lose. Secure the foundation before building the tower.
6. Revenue impact requires both technical and business fluency. The grasshopper starved despite his talent. The SE who only does technical work without connecting to business outcomes will eventually fail. You don’t need to become a finance expert. But you need to reach sufficiency in articulating cost savings, revenue enablement, risk reduction, and efficiency gains. This is the winter preparation that keeps you fed.
Learn More
MEDDPICC Sales Methodology - While not directly about strengths and weaknesses, this enterprise sales framework helps SEs identify what’s truly critical (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, Competition). Understanding what matters in complex deals helps you triage which skills to develop.
The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson - Research showing that the most successful salespeople and SEs aren’t relationship builders or hard workers. They’re challengers who teach customers something new. This book makes the case for developing the specific strength of commercial teaching rather than trying to be good at everything.