Building excellent teams
In the past couple of years I've worked for an organization (Adyen) that kicked into hyperscale after a very successful IPO, tripling the amount of people it employed and making more than a thousand new hires during the Covid-19 pandemic alone. Teams also scaled quite aggressively - some laterally, merging or splitting from other teams; some vertically, by hiring literally dozens of people in just a few months.
After Adyen, I joined Wise - a company that is equally brilliant and equally fast-growing: we're looking to hire 750 people (around 50% of our current workforce) in the first half of this year alone.
Even in normal, non-socially-distanced times, scaling a company's culture and mission is pretty complex and daunting. 'How to scale a company' is everyone's favorite topic, and I don't have much to contribute here.
What I want to focus on, instead, is how to scale teams inside a fast growing organization, starting with the difficult (and unfortunately common) set of team dynamics that can lead to subpar teams; and continuing with some experience on how to attract and retain talent (internally and externally), why people leave, and why they stay.
Excellent teams
Defining what exactly makes a team excellent is tricky: personally, I rank truly excellent product teams along three main pillars:
- they are ambitious in their promises, and do deliver on most of them: they push the envelope.
- they are in control of their product vertical and domain: they grow expertise
- they build internal processes that work for the team, but interface with the rest of the organization with standard processes that work for the org: they speak their own language, but are understood by outsiders too.
However you define it, excellence is objectively easy to assess: a process of either growth or recession will always be in place within your team, with people constantly trying to join good teams - and leaving sinking ships. So, if your team members feel like the team is a consistent dead end, they will leave it (either to another team or another company); external candidates will compare your subpar processes and roadmaps with their own experience and refuse your offers to join. If on the other hand you're constantly overdelivering, external candidates (either from other teams, or externally) will want to join your winning team, and word of mouth and referrals will take care of natural attrition for you.
Based on this, we can sketch a quick 2x2 matrix that you can use to assess what type of team you're into - and whether you're building excellence:
This matrix should be pretty explanatory; but just in case here's a recap of the four outcomes:
First, there's the trampoline team. This is your average team at a successful startup: people are motivated by the potential payoff and by the product vision you have on display, and you can easily find people to join you, either through an internal recruitment drive, or from external pipelines. But a few months in, people get burned out and leave the team, or get demotivated and stop performing, or use their experience as a leverage to a better position elsewhere. This is not an excellent team: in the long run the trampoline dynamic renders the team unsustainable, as the increasingly complex project starts collapsing onto itself because all of your expertise leaves the team after a few months.
The HR clusterf**k is exactly what the name suggest: this is a team that is so rotten that people in it want to leave pronto, and no one wants to join it. This is the team you whisper about in the cafeteria; the team that constantly gets reorganized and that hasn't shipped a feature in a year. It is usually very hard to rescue these teams internally; a functioning HR department (if you're lucky enough to see this type of unicorn in the wild) needs to come in and extinguish the fire; and then you'll have to rebuild.
The internal retirement home team is a team that no one wants to join, but no one wants to leave either. These are usually the oldest teams in the company: they run mission critical services, but lack the glamour and the excitement of pushing the envelope every single day - making it difficult to attract people. However, the work is still fun enough, and the team is well paid after many years of service. This is a good team, just not an excellent one.
Finally, the excellent team is a team that grows fast and steadily - not just because its members are excited about the work and the results, and wouldn't leave if you paid them to, but also because everyone at the company knows you're doing good work - and rumors of your success have spread well beyond the borders of your organization. People actively want to join you, and they don't leave: this is the excellent team you should be aiming for.
Why excellent people join your team
A team is more than the sum of its parts, but getting the right people to join will accelerate your product journey and help your team grow faster and with purpose. Excellent people joining your team - either internally or from other companies - generate a large return, and indeed a large part of a company's growth effort is spent in recruiting, employer branding, profile-raising and ultimately hiring.
It's really up to you to find and convince other brilliant people to join - and that's because, ultimately, the reasons why excellent people join your team are much more driven by your team than by HR or the company itself.
Your company is a sales funnel, but it's up to your team to convert your hiring prospects. So why will they want to join?
🚀 you sell them on the product
The first and foremost reason why people join you, is because they want to help build whatever it is you're building. A large portion of my interviews back at Adyen was spent explaining in detail what the product was and why it was truly revolutionary; I now do the same at Wise, spending up of 25% of my interviewing time actually explaining with full transparency the amazing stuff we're building and why we're excited about it.
You should aim to sell the candidate on your entire product: their reactions and feedback will let you learn valuable lessons about your strategy and execution, and help you gauge whether you're truly onto something. If the product is truly as great as it sounds to you, pitching it to candidates will go smoothly, and people will be impressed and start coming up with brilliant upgrades: to pitch your product to candidates in a fully transparent manner, and discuss with them how to improve it is not just the best case study there is: it's also a valuable experience for both the interviewer and the interviewee, and a good reflection of the way you'll work with the candidate on a day-to-day basis if you end up hiring him/her.
A way I've been able to do this is by involving the team early into the job search , straight from the job description draft, and including pre-sourcing and pre-screening, letting HR only sort CVs and sift out obviously spammy applications. You see, if your team is pushing the envelope, HR can't explain what you're doing to your prospect candidates, instead reverting to platitudes like "disrupting fintech" or "changing the way people pay". The controversial solution to this, is to one-up all of your competitors by moving the full hiring pipeline (except sourcing) into your team.
You might think having to pre-screen a ton of candidates instead of letting your recruiter choose a handful for you is a waste of time for you of your team, but in my experience you're not looking at this the right way. A much bigger waste of time (for you and your candidates) is doing full interview rounds for people that aren't the right fit for your team and for the product, or even worse losing people during the interviews because of weak pre-screenings that didn't manage to sell your candidate on the team. Not to mention the case where none of the people HR selected is a good fit or joins your team, and you end up having to re-open the position after wasting a month or two.
Excellent candidates have other options, but most importantly they want to be truly excited about the mission and product. Would you let HR sell your product to customers? No. So why are you letting them take the front seats in your interviewing pipeline? Sell the candidate on your team and product, and do it yourself.
🤑 you sell them on the benefits
As much as working in an excellent team is fun, people don't work for fun but because they're paid. But if a high salary were enough to convince excellent people to join, then every last one of these guys would be working at Amazon or Google and there'd be no excellency outside of companies that can pay top-of-market. Luckily, that is not the case.
So people won't join because of the monthly salary, but because of the total package - beyond the monetary compensation. This might include for instance the ability to work with people they respect or are known in the industry; to work on technologies or problems that deeply interest them. They might be attracted by the team dynamics you put on display, or by the company's profile online or in the industry at large. If they're smart, they will be attracted by the opportunities to grow and experience new things that might not be there in their current team or at their current employer.
Of course, you should be upfront about what your team can afford in net terms, as well as don't skimp on the monetary perks such as stock options, bonuses, free lunches, tax breaks or the famous ping pong table. You should read up on what the position is offering, and be upfront about it.
But ultimately, monetary benefits are easy to compare: for that reason, it's difficult to compete with the apex predators of the tech market on measurable (monetary) advantages. The key to get excellent people to join, then, is to know your tangible benefits, and sell them on that.
I have never taken the best-paying out of all of my offers when I was looking for a job, and in fact I went for the lowest paying job more than once, because I loved the total benefits. I'm convinced there's more people like me: your aim is to find them and convince them of the value of what you're offering.
🤝 the team sells them on the team
This one's easy: your team should be excited about other people joining your team. For this to happen, the team doesn't need to be winning - but it needs to be happy and well managed, with a culture of excitement, transparency, and fairness.
Once I interviewed for a very cool neobank. During my final interview I asked a question about something the CPO had told me in an earlier discussion. Both of my interviewers stood up - one running to a booth and the other one ducking for the nearest broom closet - so they could rant freely about how short-changed they felt by the CPO, without being eavesdropped on by the guy. Needless to say, if your team is sabotaging your interviews like that, you won't have anyone joining you from the outside. And the same goes for internal recruiting.
Keep your team happy: if your people wouldn't join your team again, why would others?
Why excellent people leave your team
As we've seen from our classic 2x2 matrix, having excellent people join your team is not enough to have an excellent team: you might very well be sitting on the powder keg that's a trampoline team - the chaotic team where people are coming and going every month.
The reality is training people - as excellent as they might be - takes time. So once you've spent the time and effort to have people work in the beautiful machine that is your team, you also want them to stay a long time. In some roles, growth can truly be exponential and there's very few things that are as cool as seeing your teammates evolve in their roles and responsibilities.
Retention is in my opinion even more important than recruitment; and even though some people will leave eventually, you want them to love their job and their product up to their very last day in your team.
When that's not the case, why do people leave?
🙊 you lied about the product
Every product has its struggles, and a big part of an excellent team is fighting together to rectify whatever flaws the product has. If you were transparent about what the team needed, and what the steps are to get the product to where you want it to be, working every day to get to that point is one of the best team-building an career-building experiences you can have.
But if you told someone you needed their expertise in machine learning and then have them sanitize Excel sheets day-in, day-out; if you promised the product would launch in Q1 but it's Q3 and you're still on staging; or if you told them they would be instrumental in driving the product map but you always let others override their decisions, then people will go:
"this is not what I signed up for"
and leave. And you deserve it.
🙈 you compensate your team unfairly
As the previous point already hinted at, people will leave the team if they feel disconnected from it. Now, the worst way to drive a wedge between your team members is to provide differential benefits to some people, whether because of connections, favoritism, because they can negotiate better, or any other reason really.
At Wise we have transparent career maps, everyone doing the same job is paid more or less similarly, and it's clear what the progression, the expectations and the benefits that come with unlocking a higher level of expertise are.
At other companies I worked for, compensation was exceedingly unfair: people doing the same job would get double the salary, there would be no clear career progression (often hidden behind empty slogans like "own your career" or "we have no titles"), some people would get to travel or go to fancy events while others would endlessly slave away. People left in droves.
As a company, you might think transparency and fairness will lead to collective bargaining and ultimately to paying more for the same service. That is not correct: you will, indeed, end up paying slightly more in total for the same headcount; but people will stay for much longer - and the final cost to achieve your product goals will therefore be much lower in the long run.
Ultimately, transparency and fairness are the primary drivers of retention, because few people benchmark against the market, but everyone benchmarks against their nearest peers. In close-knit teams, your peers are your teammates. If someone is getting treated unfairly, they will find out about it, and they will leave you. What's the price of someone excellent leaving - and is it really worth saving 10k a year?
🙉 you don't listen to your team
Your manager's worst nightmare: the high performer, the star, clears his or her throat during office drinks and goes:
"Team, I have an announcement. Today is my last day at..."
Managers will tell you that people leaving out of the blue happens all the time. This is a blatant lie: in high performing teams, no one leaves out of the blue.
You see, looking for a job is a long, tiring and draining experience - no matter how good you are. It forces you to confront your inadequacies, to step out of your comfort zone, and jump into a new role with limited information. And if you're currently working in an excellent team, the likelihood of finding another excellent team elsewhere is not that high.
So people will only take the leap after you've had them cornered for a long time. Maybe they wanted to relocate to be with their loved ones, and you kept stalling. Maybe they wanted to work from home twice a week to be with their daughter, and you refused it. Maybe they felt they weren't paid enough, and you didn't manage to offer a compelling reason why they shouldn't, or a raise if they deserved it. Maybe they felt unsure in their role or of themselves, and you didn't give them enough support. And the list goes on...
By and large, in excellent teams, people will voice their concerns and unhappiness to their teammates and to their managers. If you ignore their concerns for long enough, they'll become louder, and unhappy, and start looking for a new job. By the time you get here, you've eroded all of their goodwill and they are no longer benchmarking internally, but on the market. And eventually, they will leave.
If you conclude they left out of the blue, you don't deserve to lead an excellent team. Learn to listen to your colleagues and your people, and flag concerns early enough, and no one will leave "out of the blue" ever again.
Why you want an excellent team
If you read the entire post, you might be thinking that excellent teams sure are a lot of work. And indeed, you'd be right: a team's natural entropic configuration is that of being not excellent, and it takes a lot of energy to reverse that process and maintain your team's high performance level.
So why would you want to do it?
- Excellent teams lead you to meet truly remarkable people. I'm not just talking about good friends, but about people that will truly change your perspective on how to live your life and what is possible to do with today's resources, freedom and technology.
- Excellent teams turbocharge your careers, which means more options to do what you want, wherever you want to, and (if that interests you), to get comfortably paid for doing it.
- Excellent teams are a pleasure to work with. Even the biggest slackers I've ever met spent at least 20-30 hours pretending to work every week - that's 1/3 of your waking life. Do you really want to spend one out of every 3 breaths you take doing something you don't care about with unremarkable people?
- Excellent teams are the reason why we work. If you work in product or engineering, it's because you like having your brain teased and challenged every day. Don't pretend working in a subpar team makes you happy - if it did, you probably wouldn't be doing this line of work.
My personal advice is to be real to yourself and start charting the course to an excellent team. It's worth it.