Head of Engineering
Some tips & tricks for hiring a Head of Engineering.
Size matters… a lot.
In the book Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman talks about the size of your org needing different approaches:
- Family (1-9 employees)
- Tribe (10-49)
- Village (50-499
- City (500-9,999)
- Nation (10k+)
Make sure you’re hiring people who have experience in your size and what you want do (e.g. grow to the next size up, save money, improve quality, etc - at your size).
When people hire senior engineers or sales people from giant companies and then wonder why they don’t fit, I see that as a problem from the hiring party as much as the new employee.
On a similar note, what got you here won’t necessarily get you there. The Head of Engineering may need to be layered in the future when you switch to the next stage. So be it.
Superalignment
- Are you hiring a Head of Engineering, or a Principal Engineer? The CTO projects communications outwards (exec team, board, conferences), the HoE projects communications inwards (tech team leads). A Principal Engineer does not necessarily need to project communication beyond their direct job scope and building alignment (although it helps), and so may fail as a Head of Engineering if they do not have skill.
- What responsibilities are you not willing to handover? Does the incoming HoE agree with that?
- What are your most controversial views on tech? Ensure alignment during interviewing, or you’ll be fighting with your own team.
- Which external parties will the HoE deal with regularly, and which will be covered by someone else. E.g. Audit/regulatory, broader exec team, vendor management, etc. Many HoEs don’t want to deal with a lot of that.
- Does the role just cover engineering, or is there a product element to it as well? How much freedom does the product org give them?
- How much latitude does the person have for rewriting stuff? Align with your personal views on tech debt vs new features, etc.
Managing A Team
- The developers in the team need to respect the incoming HoE. Depending on your org size (see above), this either means being currently highly hands-on, or at least previously so for larger organisations.
- Where appropriate, involve senior engineers who have been with the company for a long time and understand the culture in the hiring process. This also helps with buy-in.
Selection Criteria Beyond the Obvious
- Whiteboarding interview where they have to explain a technical topic (ideally one you’re not super familiar with) using the whiteboard. If at the end of it, you feel you learnt something, and the whiteboard is useful - great. If at the end of it you’re confused… well, that’s probably how your engineers are going to feel every day.
- Try to find public blogs/videos/github to check skills/alignment to your beliefs (negotiable, not everyone is out there).
- Does the person have other people they would ideally bring in? Strong people often have loyal relationships. Although consider there may be downsides to that if they always want to work with the same people.