Hire "10x Teams" not 10 times the people
Posted by fling on December 19
http://avichal.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/focus-on-building-10x-teams-not-on-hiring-10x-developers/
A great post on the value of hiring “10x Teams” or teams that can scale beyond themselves, not just 10 times the people – or “butts in seats” as I refer to them. The idea is five of the right people is better spent than building one team of ten. That extraordinary people can do far more than regular people. And you should hire for the extraordinary.
My favorite part of this post is this diagram, which shows the qualities you need in a 10x Team. From my experience, this diagram is spot on for creating the perfect team that can solve really hard problems and create some pretty amazing shit.
I think we see this at a lot of great companies, but most clearly at Apple versus Microsoft or Google. Apple has created far better products with less resources than the competition. And now the market reflects that – Apple created 10x the value by hiring 10x Teams. Clearly the 10x Team model works.
Building a strong core team has always been a core principle of mine at each of my companies. That it is better to be focused, specialized and boutique rather than a big crank-it-out app factory. The problem in advanced markets like mobile, customers don’t always know what they want, so it can be hard for them to see the value of one versus the other.
So your small boutique firm ends up doing a bit of everything, because they are ethical and believe in building great products. But this also means while you have your A-Team, you’ve given them B-level work. So it doesn’t take long for your A-Team to feel like a B-Team.
This clearly doesn’t work, but fortunately goes away as the market matures. I think 2012 will be that year as we’ve already seen the signs in 2011.
Today I posted that we are looking to add to our family at pinch/zoom but let’s be clear: we are looking to continue to add to our existing 10x Team, we are not looking for 10 times the people.