Building & Leading Teams
5 concepts · ~25 min · Advanced
Master the leadership skills that scale: hiring right, delegating effectively, setting goals with OKRs, running lean, and automating what you can.
What You'll Learn
- ✓Design a structured hiring process that predicts performance (not just pedigree)
- ✓Use the Delegation Ladder to empower your team without losing control
- ✓Write OKRs that measure outcomes, not outputs
- ✓Apply lean principles to eliminate waste in your engineering pipeline
- ✓Calculate the ROI of automating a process and know when NOT to automate
Hiring Strategy
Leadership
💡 The Concept
Hiring strategy determines WHO you hire, WHEN you hire them, and HOW you evaluate fit. A bad hire costs 1.5-3x their annual salary when you factor in recruiting costs, lost productivity, team disruption, and eventual severance. At early-stage startups, one bad hire out of 10 employees is a 10% organizational failure rate.
⚠️ The Trap
Founders hire for skills and ignore culture fit. A brilliant engineer who can't collaborate destroys 3x more value than they create. Equally dangerous: hiring friends because they're 'trusted' instead of hiring the best person for the role. Netflix famously fired founders' friends when they outgrew their roles — it's painful but necessary.
🎯 The Action
For every role, define: (1) The exact problem this person solves in the next 6 months, (2) The 3 must-have skills with evidence tests, (3) The culture values with behavioral interview questions. Use structured interviews with scorecards — unstructured interviews are only 14% predictive of job performance.
Scenario Challenge
You're a 15-person startup that just raised Series A. You need to hire a VP of Engineering. You have two finalists: Candidate A has 15 years at Google and Amazon, expects $350K salary, and has never worked at a company under 500 people. Candidate B has 7 years of experience, led a team of 8 at a startup that grew to 50, expects $220K, and has shipped products end-to-end.