A couple of years ago at Jenni we spent time breaking down retention strategies of software products.

One pattern we found is where ability to use a tool becomes a synonym for the skill it supports (e.g. Photoshop/ Illustrator).

The term we coined internally was ‘product as a skill’.

In short, this is where a company manages to convince people that mastering the use of their tool is actually a valuable skill in and of itself.

Anyone who obtains this ‘skill’ is incentivised to advocate for its continued relevance in order to retain their competitive advantage in the labor market.

The irony is that difficult to operate tools can, for a while, become the standard.

The second force at play is the educational market becomes flooded with educational content to teach the tool.

’How to use illustrator’, ‘Become a Photoshop expert’ type of content.

Young and eager new entrants to the labor market rationally work backwards from job descriptions and available learning materials. Thus they start prioritizing learning tools rather than foundational knowledge (skills).

But tooling in the software sense has a limited lifespan, tools change with trends, disruption cycles, and fashion.

Consider the graveyard of “essential” tools:

• 1990s: WordPerfect was the legal standard. Law firms hired based on WP proficiency.
• 2000s: Dreamweaver expert was a specialized skill commanding premium rates.
• 2010s: Mastering Facebook’s ads became “marketing expertise.”
• 2020s: Mastering Figma is the current proxy for mastering design.

Tools are temporary, principles and fundamentals endure.

In some domains, skill is deeply tied to the tool. A guitarist and their guitar, a sculptor and their clay. For the guitarist, wielding the tool correctly might be as important as knowing music theory. This is not the case with modern knowledge work.

If you are an aspiring designer or marketer, your advantage will come from layering feedback from real world experiments on top of fundamentals of psychology, behavioural economics, systems thinking etc.

Tools are still important.

They are the interface between to expert and their effect on the world. But effective operators can quickly master new tools and practice ‘just-in-time’ learning.

For example, if you need to animate a UI, a 2-day deep dive of Rive is sufficient to apply your true knowledge about easing curves.

The goal isn’t to avoid tools, but to ensure they serve your deeper expertise rather than define it.

Predicting tomorrow’s tools is hard. Instead, we can ask ourselves if the current topic we are learning would have been applicable 5, 20, 100 years ago. If so, we are likely obtaining valuable, transferable knowledge.