Do Not Ignore the Voice of Those Who Will Suffer the Consequences of Your Decision!
DISCLAIMER: This thought has been brewing in my head for a few years. It comes from observations in workplaces I’ve been a part of and other people’s stories.
PS: I will be mostly talking about web startups, but this might also be relevant for other type of companies.
If you are a company that’s growing, you will want to hire new people to manage the expanding scope that comes with growth. That’s typical and normal behavior. Yet, done without lots of consideration, it can be a very toxic move for the company culture. Growth is tough. Rapid growth is even tougher, and managing it can be a founder’s most important role. Growth gone wrong has affected companies in a very negative way, and has been known to contribute to demise of certain startups.
A silly mistake some companies do is think that a new hire that has a different title than others on the team can be vetted without the input of the other team members. What do I mean by that? For example, let’s say you are a tech startup and you feel the need to hire a product owner/manager to help translate the ideas of the founders to products and features that the tech team can develop. The mistake would be to think that the only people who need to vet the product owner hire are the founders, because the product owner will not be writing code, so the tech team does not need to vet them. That couldn’t be any farther from the truth.
I believe that the people who most need to vet a new hire are the people who will suffer the consequences. The consequences of hiring a new product owner will not be suffered by the founders on the same level as the developers. Why? Because who will have to actually implement any new ideas that the new product owner will come up with? Who will inherit the responsibilities and consequences of decisions made by the product owner? That’s the tech team. So although the product owner will work closely with the founders to translate their vision into wireframes, it’s the developers that will “suffer the consequences”.
Let’s take another example, a designer. Again, in a startup with a small group of people, you don’t have a design team and a head of design or CCO or whatever, so the founders are most likely the ones involved in the hiring process. And again, they believe that, as founders, it’s up to them to choose who to hire. They have the final say on what the product should look like and what message they want to communicate to their users and clients. The tone is set by the founders. So they take it up on themselves to vet the potential hires, and choose the one they want to go with, without any input from the rest of the team. But I ask the question again, who is going to “suffer the consequences”? Who will need to write the code that translates the designs to actual HTML and CSS and whatever else is needed to integrate the designs into the product?
And now to the final example, a front end developer. The designer that was hired in the example above, came up with a new redesign of the app, but the tech team does not have the bandwidth to implement both the core features that are must be done ASAP and the new redesign. The tech team is only one person after all, maybe two. It’s an early stage startup don’t forget! So the founders, again, go out and look for a front end developer to contract with on a temporary basis in order to implement the redesign. They do not get the tech team involved, because they do not want to distract them. But, I ask the question again, who is going to “suffer the consequences”? Who is going to have to review the pull requests? Who will have to work with the front end code in the future?
I want to continue painting the picture for you so you’d understand where I’m coming from. Startup founders are most likely people with a good idea and domain knowledge. But their domain is not tech. They do not understand the ins and outs of building a tech product. They are still smart people, and they learn quick. What they miss though are some important questions that need to be asked of new hires, to make sure that whoever they bring is compatible. Ask any random person what does a “designer” do, and they will not have the slightest idea. In fact, ask a 100 people who work in tech what are the different disciplines of design and most of them, unless they are designers themselves, will not know the answer. I am married to a web designer, I have lived through the hiring process with my wife, and I know that most companies do not know what a designer does because their job descriptions show that they have no clue. Is a web designer a graphic designer? Is a web designer a front end developer? Is a web designer a UI designer? a UX designer? All of the above? Some combination of the above? You can ask 10 different creative directors who will be in charge of hiring a designer for their company and you’d get 10 different answers. And that’s a creative director, in other terms the most experienced and knowledgeable person in the company about branding, design, and communication. Then how could we expect a non technical founder to know any better?
Why does it matter? I’ve worked with print designers (designers who design book covers), who were producing designs for the web. What do you think the outcome was? Do you think a book and a website behave the same way? Can you resize the book cover to a 1000 different sizes (13" screen, 15" screen, 5" screen, 9" screen, etc)? Do you interact with a book cover by submitting a form? The answer is obvious: no. Do you think the principles of print design apply 100% to web design, or are there domain specific principles that are vastly different and require a specific expertise in the domain to know them? So do you see why it could be a problem if founders who do not understand the specifics of design and development vet a potential hire for a design position without the input of the developers, or at least someone with deeper knowledge of expectations?
If the team needed a new developers, I find it hard to imagine that the founders would hire someone without brining in the current developers into the process. So why do they do it when it comes to other positions? I think the reason is simple. They do not understand a single word a developer utters, so they do not feel like they have the knowledge to vet a developer, but they believe they do understand what a product owner or designer says, so they feel empowered to cast judgment on the credentials of those hires, and do not need the input of anyone else. There is also sometimes an ego issue that comes to play. A founder wants to be in charge of the brand and the product, so they don’t think a developer should have any input on that aspect of the work. A silly thing, but egos make people do really silly things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In a startup environment, the last thing founders want is to have their developers sitting in on one interview after the other. The developers are already most likely the bottleneck, and I can see why it’s tempting to want to save them from the distraction. I do, however, plead with all founders, do not ignore their voice. What may seem independent roles actually have direct impact on everyone in the team. So give everyone the chance to vet any new addition to the team before you make a decision. And most importantly, give them the power to veto a new hire if given a strong reason or opinion. If you don’t, you’ll end up losing the current team, and potentially the company culture along with it.
