Hiring Breakpoints

As part of writing Stay SaaSy we speak with and advise a fair number of startups, and one of the most common topics of conversation is how many people they should hire. The most important factor to consider when expanding a team is that the usefulness of incremental hires is not linear. Sometimes an additional person helps a lot. Sometimes they don’t help at all, due to structural overlap or the quality of the hire (and keep in mind that for some roles, quality is much less reliable). The key point is that the utility of a marginal hire varies dramatically depending on role and whether you’re crossing a key breakpoint in terms of team size. The value of a new hire can even be negative. And there are a few important breakpoints to consider on the journey of growing your team. These might seem a bit obvious, but the important realization is that at these breakpoints hiring decisions are much more important, so if you keep them in mind as hard thresholds you’ll make better scaling…