Your team is a product roadmap (and most founders are building it on the fly)

There's a pattern that shows up in almost every early-stage startup, and it goes something like this. Something isn't working whether a function is stretched, a gap is visible, a problem is slowing the business down. The instinct is immediate: we need to hire for this. A spec gets written (or prompted), the role goes out, interviews happen, and a hire gets made. Three months later, a different problem has appeared. The cycle repeats.

Martin Falch, partner at Erevena, has spent 25 years doing executive search for investor-backed companies, and he has a name for this. "It's a whack-a-mole game," he says. "You solve one gap or vacuum in the management team, and in the next stage, another one pops up." The observation isn't a criticism, he sees it everywhere and in companies at every stage. But the founders who scale well are the ones who figure out that hiring is an organizational design problem as much as a talent problem.

Most management teams, if you look at them honestly, are what Martin describes as "a patchwork of brilliant people who are at the wrong place at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons." Not because the founders hired badly, but because they hired reactively. They filled the gap they felt rather than the gap the business actually needed filled. The way he talks about the alternative is instructive: treat your team the way a good product manager treats a product roadmap. Not just "what do we need now" but "what will this function need to look like in 12 months, and does the person we have today get us there?"

Start with the org, not the role

The practical implication of this is that the first question isn't "who do we need to hire?" It's "what does this organization need to look like?" That sounds abstract, but it doesn't have to be. Martin is deliberate about keeping it skeletal, you're not drawing an org chart for a 200-person company. You're asking: what functions need to exist, what structures does the founder need around them, and what working processes need to be in place for the next stage of growth?

This is also where founders often discover they were about to make the wrong hire. Not a bad hire, but the wrong one. Martin recalls working with a founding CEO who was convinced they needed a CRO, but after mapping the org and the team already in place, it became clear the actual gap was a CFO. The pain was in revenue, so a revenue hire felt logical. But the organizational problem was different.

Andreas Thorsheim, founder and CEO of Otovo, put it to Martin this way: He used to think growth was about talent, but eventually came to believe it was all about the organization. That's not a rejection of talent, rather a recognition that even great people underperform when the design around them is wrong. "Hiring without context is always going to be abstract and extremely difficult," Martin says, "no matter how great a talent you meet."

People have cycles

One of the more counterintuitive things Martin talks about is reading someone's trajectory; understanding not just where a person is today, but where they're headed and when they're likely to peak in a given environment.

Early-stage startups reward a particular kind of person: comfortable with ambiguity, high tolerance for chaos, good at moving fast without process. Those aren't the same traits that serve a company well when it's raised a Series B and needs governance, cross-functional coordination, and structure. Some of the people who struggled in the first eighteen months (who were perhaps a little too structured, a little too process-minded for the early chaos) are the ones who come into their own at the later stage and occasionally become the COO or the backbone of the business.

The product roadmap analogy holds here too. In product development, ideas that didn't fit version one sometimes become essential in version three. A person can be the wrong hire for the company you are today and the right hire for the company you're building toward. The founders who recognize this build better teams over time, because they're making decisions based on trajectory rather than just current performance.

It also works in reverse. Reading trajectories means being honest about when someone has reached the peak of their cycle in a given role, and having that conversation before it becomes a bigger problem. "Having someone for a more scaled startup is essentially reading their trajectory," Martin says. "You have to keep that perspective."

Backward engineer the process

When a hire does need to happen, the founders who get it right consistently do one thing first: they define what great looks like before they start looking. That sounds obvious, but it's less common than it should be.

Håkon Høgetveit, CEO of Vouch, described his own version of this when reflecting on a recent hire on the team. He had a strong candidate in mind early (a trusted referral from within his network) and his instinct was good. But instead of running with the instinct, he forced himself to first define what the role actually needed to accomplish: what success would look like in six months, what failure would look like, and what kind of person would genuinely thrive in it. He mapped that definition against the candidate. He also vetted it against a broader pool, not to find someone different, but to pressure-test whether his definition of the role held up.

"I backward-engineered the process," he said. "I had the answer, but I forced myself to go through the steps anyway." The discipline is about not letting the urgency of the moment collapse the quality of the decision. When the scope is clear upfront, the gut call at the end of the process is more trustworthy, because the judgment is working from a real foundation rather than a feeling.

This is the part of the process Vouch is built around: helping founders get specific about what they're actually hiring for before they open a role, structuring that definition into the process, and screening against it consistently. The idea is that the judgment you bring to the final decision is only as good as the clarity you built at the start.

Before your next hire

The next time a gap appears (and it will) it's worth asking the question one level up before you write the spec. Not "who do we need to bring in?" but "what does this team need to look like in twelve months, and is this hire what closes that gap?"

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the answer is that the problem is organizational, not a headcount problem. And sometimes the person you already have just hasn't hit their stride yet. That distinction is worth making before the job posting goes out.

This piece draws on a conversation from The Hire Bar, Vouch's podcast series featuring practitioners with real things to say about what works in hiring. Listen to the full conversation with Martin Falch here.