Barrels and ammunition

I was listening to Lenny's Newsletter podcast with Keith Rabois and one framework stayed with me: barrels vs ammunition.

Barrels are the people who can take something from strategy to execution with very little oversight: the kind that carry the system forward. Ammunition is specialist firepower, meaning deep craft, sharp expertise, big impact in a narrower lane.

Companies often hire as if one should replace the other. Either they over-index on barrels and end up with smart generalists stepping over each other, or they over-index on ammunition and wonder why nothing quite connects across the value chain.

If you only have ammunition, you get pockets of excellence without enough people who can connect the dots, make decisions and move things through the system. If you only have barrels, you risk building a company of capable orchestrators without enough real depth where it counts.

As specialist execution gets easier to augment with AI, the value of people who can move between abstraction and execution goes up. People who can see the whole, ask the right questions, get into the weeds when needed, and get back out again without creating a theatre production around it.

That does not make specialists less important. Quite the opposite. It just makes the composition of the team much more visible. You still need ammunition, especially in digital commerce; you just become a lot more aware of whether you also have enough barrels to aim it.