AI operations manager. Artur
As a team grows, what worked with ten people starts to break. We look at the mistakes founders make most often.
Level: for beginners
Language: Russian
Duration: 1:27
As a team grows, what worked with ten people starts to break: information no longer flows on its own, roles overlap, and agreements rested on personal relationships. Here are the mistakes that come up most often in breakdowns by investors and practitioners.
First: hiring without defining the role. Founders often hire to take load off themselves rather than to cover a clear area of responsibility. The new person walks into uncertainty and invents their own way of working. The role has to be defined before you post the job, and this cannot be handed off to the person you hire.
Second: hiring fast and firing slowly. Phin Barnes of First Round Capital explains why this is dangerous: weak employees are not removed quickly enough, and they in turn hire even weaker ones. One practitioner suggests asking yourself: “Would I hire this person for this role today?” If the answer is “no,” the decision has already been made; you are just postponing it.
Third: promoting the best specialist to manager without preparation. The best salesperson or engineer won't necessarily become a good manager: the skills don't transfer. As a result, you lose both a strong individual contributor and the team that ends up under weak leadership. The solution: offer a separate career track for strong individual contributors and real training for those who become managers.
Fourth: delegating the task but not the authority. You say “this is your area,” and then ask them to clear decisions with you. People quickly realize that real power has stayed with you. Then the founder, who used to be the source of energy, becomes the bottleneck.
Fifth: building a big team before a repeatable model. Many companies scale too fast and suffer from too many people and too much cost while the business model is not yet fine-tuned.
Sixth: running hiring personally for too long. Founders who insist on interviewing every candidate slow the company down. Experts advise finding a recruiting specialist you trust in good time, rather than handing this to a generalist employee.
Seventh: putting off HR. Founders carefully calculate customer acquisition cost and revenue but often overlook the cost of turnover and hiring mistakes.
The overall takeaway: most of these mistakes come not from a lack of effort, but from the founder continuing to manage the way they managed a team of ten.
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