zacsky

This is a constant challenge I have faced in leading software development teams...

The tendency, especially early on in a product's lifetime, is to think everything is a top priority and therefore rely on the development estimates (i.e. price) to decide what to build next. But that's like looking at the restaurant menu and picking the pumpkin soup and the tofu burger because they are cheapest when your customer would actually prefer to wait and just get the delicious steak.

That is a good question!

It made sense from the perspective that the product we were building was good but a little 'behind' our competitors and we needed to catch up.

The scaling has allowed us to tackle new projects that utilise the underlying platform that we would have otherwise not been able to even consider.

Quality (for engineering skill AND attitude) was the top focus, salaries were market rate, and there are no options/RSUs involved.

Thanks for the suggestions about the follow up to hiring and measuring success. It seems most of the comments want to know more about this so I will look at a follow-up post.

Thanks for your comment. Glad you enjoyed the series.

I did consider a 6th article looking at the longer term outcomes but decided at the time to cut it. Might have to reconsider as there seems to be good interest.

A lot of the things I recommend doing in the first month are just repeatable for the length of their employment. But there is a greater question I think you are asking around how do you know when you made a good hire? That's a big curly question probably worthy of a follow-up post.

In 2016, after being acquired by private investors, we were given the green light to triple our engineering team as fast as possible. In this article (part 3 of a 5 part series) I focus on all the preparations required before starting to hire.

In 2016, after being acquired by private investors, we were given the green light to triple our engineering team as fast as possible. In this article (part 2 of a 5 part series) I dive deeper on how we actually planned the massive task we were embarking upon, the questions we needed to ask, and the important lessons we learned about planning to scale.

In November 2016 the company I worked for was acquired, injected with cash, and told to 'go faster'. Over the next six months I led a recruitment drive that saw the engineering team (more than) triple. This is a 5-part blog series on that massive recruitment process; starting with the background story that led us to need to scale at such a pace.