Coming up with a brilliant idea for a product comes easy to some, but making that product and building a company out of it is anything but. You’re bound to mess up along the way, but hopefully, you learn as you go and end up creating an organization that’s a great success. At least this was the case for Zendesk founder Mikkel Svane, who asserts that hiring the right people is a huge factor in that success. We were lucky enough to help in the recruiting process all along the way.
(Startups) – From making a product to building a company – and messing up on the way!
As we started hiring in San Francisco, we probably felt more comfortable hiring engineers and technical people than we did for other roles.
The technical side was our turf; for that, we mostly knew what we were looking for. But when it came to other roles, we didn’t know what we were doing.
Design and marketing were areas that we cared about profoundly. But we had very little experience hiring product designers or marketers, and we had a hard time framing what we needed.
The world of product management was an issue in itself. I think we didn’t intrinsically understand that the people spec’ing and defining the product were a separate species from the people building it.