Startup Lesson: Keeping Up a Team
What I Learned in a Year of Intense Hiring
One year may be short, but I am thankful for the experience of growing a Product Design team in a huge e-commerce startup in Indonesia. The biggest challenge was in sourcing the right talents. The country’s Design education and IT education have yet to improve and adjust with the industry requirements. I am glad that what I learned is confirmed by people much more experienced than me.
The most important consideration that I had since the beginning was how to keep the team together. Early on, the team consisted of either untrained people or skilled people who did not know how to pass on skills to the untrained ones. It was exacerbated by some inevitable politics once the organization started to take shape. As in every human-made institution, organization structure may reveal the human nature’s need to control and be at the positions that hold power. I was very much aware that I had to protect my team members from politics in addition to keeping the members together. Therefore, having the right attitude is what I first looked from a candidate.
Attitude, Attribute, Aptitude
Attitude
Does this candidate have a growth mindset (how to educate your child to have one)? Someone with growth mindset would see everyone as a work in progress, treats mistakes as learning points, and sees extra effort as challenges. Without this, people are seen as stones, mistakes are used to blame others, and extra effort is seen as a proof of incapability.
Is this candidate a team player? A team player would care about the team members as well as the company, who sees the company like a family or a tight-knit community. Without this, a team member may break the trust within the team over saving his/her own face. The combination of a team player and growth mindset would make the person able to share knowledge with others and willing to learn how to improve him/herself in doing so.
Is this candidate a missionary or mercenary? A missionary cares about the state of the company to relate with his/her personal mission e.g. fixing design debts. This candidate wants to see it happen in the company as well as acting on it (not just criticizing). Without this, a team member only cares about the reward given by the company.
Attribute
The second thing I looked from a candidate is having the appropriate attributes, or what some people call “culture fit”. I did learn to ask how the candidate would deal with a younger team lead, due to the hierarchical local culture in a regional office, but culture fit a.k.a. Attribute is something else.
Generally in a startup, one of the most frequent thing an employee can face is change. The candidate needs to be comfortable with frequent changes that often times breed ambiguity. Ambiguity is real. Sometimes I discovered a candidate with a neat resume who surprisingly had trouble discussing the details of a past job, while another candidate could enthusiastically tell a story about his/her previous experience dealing with ambiguity.
Some startups also appreciate proactive and practical behavior, which is especially required in a team dealing with product development. As products need to be released on time, no one has time to micromanage anyone. Designers and engineers need to own their parts in the process and continually propose improvement and challenge each other toward a better product quality. This particular attribute is hard to recognize during an interview. It can be observed during the probation period.
Aptitude
The last thing I looked from a candidate is Aptitude, or the skills needed to be able to perform based on the job description. This does not mean that we consider skills the last, but it is about hiring below the company’s standard. I never worry hiring a fresh graduate (with good potentials), because usually they show exponential growth within their first two months, and after four months their product team members can already tell about how much they contribute.
Please note, having Aptitude as the last thing to consider needs to be combined with an existing condition where the team consists of people with growth mindset. These people would help the new joiners to grow their skills. The growing effort is not costly if it only takes two months to get them on track with the basics.
The good potentials are recognized by screening resumes and portfolios. There are also must-have basic skills. For most types of designers, it is about passing a technical test prior to the interviews. For a new type of design position (no such position in the industry yet), we require empathy skills (recognizable during the interview).
The Stage of a Startup
I could relate so much with the experience of a startup co-founder about hiring in Indonesia. He learned to lower the bar of technical skills and found so much value in hiring for Attitude and Attribute, as quoted “If you have to compromise, compromise on skills, never compromise on work ethic.” Exactly for the same reason “Screw it! if I can’t hire anyone, I can’t move fast.” We needed the people to support the product development!
His experience about the stage of a startup is also very relevant to my experience, as quoted “you don’t need scalability when you’re an early stage startup.” When I joined this startup, it was at the stage where scalability had to be badly considered. Good scalability needs both scalable design and a scalable team. Scalable design is not achieved just by the work of a single very skillful designer. It requires a scalable team, which consists of people with the right Attitude.
So, the stage was exactly the time we had to start hiring missionary team players with a growth mindset. Without that, what would propagate across the company and impact new joiners is a negative influence. As quoted in an article “When an employee has a bad attitude, that person creates starts a negative downward spiral. I cannot afford to have that in my team.” This is much more costly than growing the skills of an entry level member.
At that time, the company planned new product lines by hiring several more product managers. The Product Design team grew double in size, even after losing a third of the original team during that growth. “Growing pains” are sometimes necessary. We had to hire for so many and had to adjust with tighter resource management. Some team members were very helpful in their willingness to rotate across teams.
People Come and Go
Who’s the most important support in the hiring process? Yes, the recruiter. Fortunately, I worked with a fast-learner who had a good persuasion and people reading skills. The talent requirements were new to her, but eventually she was able to screen resumes herself with some misses. I can now call herself a design recruitment specialist for a tech startup.
How do I recognize all those 3 As in an interview? Definitely, Aptitude is the easiest to recognize. We hardly missed our good judgment, except for a certain job function, which is switchable within the Design team. Attitude is recognizable by asking the right questions and reviewing the candidate’s past records.
Attribute is the hardest to recognize. I had to recognize it in a face to face interview. It is tricky as some candidates had to be interviewed via Internet calls, especially those who were abroad finishing their studies, and those recruited for our regional offices. Without face to face interviews, sometimes I preferred the safe side. When I did not have sufficient things to consider to help me decide, usually I decided a no. Still, we got some candidates with the inappropriate Attribute who eventually had to be let go after the probation period, and some continued until proven by HR via performance review.
Attitude wins over Attribute. Sometimes we kept a candidate with inappropriate Attribute, because it can still be trained. Once, I had to make a tough decision of letting go a team member because of the persistent inappropriate Attribute after more than a year, affecting his/her Aptitude growth. It took several 1-on-1 sessions with the team member to help him/her understand how he/she would thrive in another company that does not require the startup-appropriate Attribute. Since he/she had a good Attitude, we encouraged him/her to find a better opportunity before we let him/her go. It was a learning experience for both of us, and we keep a good relationship until today.
The right Attitude, although recognizable during the interviews, may not stay as the company grows. It is the scalability factor that can change people. A team player may no longer be a team player if new joiners threaten his/her status quo. A missionary may no longer keep up if he/she cannot adjust with the scalability requirements. These may affect the growth mindset or reveal a lack of growth mindset in the first place. Such employees would resign in order to find an opportunity that better suits him/her.
I have learned so much in a startup that grew from 300 to 1000 employees in a year. I encountered so many people and appreciated the ones who grew together with me. Miscommunication and misaligned expectations were the ones that boosted our growth. Why? Because we overcome it by having open conversations and withholding judgement. Solving miscommunication and misaligned expectations that way can get us really, really far.
I wish those who failed to see the necessary growing efforts can at least understand that we endure all this with the best intention in our minds: to help both the company and the team members. We are aware that most team members are young, so they have such a long time to go to fill a brighter future. We did not want to waste their growth opportunity by creating an inappropriate environment.
All the best!
