Want advice on management/organization-building?

By Ben Kuhn @ 2022-11-15T03:40 (+141)

Someone observed to me recently that there are a lot of new EA organizations whose founders don't have much experience building teams and could benefit from advice from someone further along in the scaling process. Is this you, or someone you know? If so, I'd be interested in talking about your management/org-building challenges :) You can reach out through the forum's messaging feature or email me (ben dot s dot kuhn at the most common email address suffix).

About me / credentials: I'm the CTO of Wave, a startup building financial infrastructure for unbanked people in sub-Saharan Africa. I joined as an engineer in the very early days (employee #6), became CTO in 2019, and subsequently grew the engineering team from ~2 to 70+ engineers while the company overall scaled to ~2k people. Along the way I had to address a large number of different team-scaling problems, both within engineering and across the rest of Wave. I also write a blog with some advice posts that people have found useful.

Example areas I might have useful input on:

• Hiring: clarifying roles, writing job descriptions, developing interview loops, executing hiring processes, headcount planning...
• People management: coaching, feedback, handling unhappy or underperforming people, designing processes for things like performance reviews
• Organizational structure: grouping people into teams, figuring out good boundaries between teams, adding management layers

About you: a leader at an organization that's experiencing (or about to experience) a bunch of growth, and could use advice on how to navigate the scaling problems that come with that.

Structure: pretty uncertain since I've never done this before, but I'm thinking some sort of biweekly or weekly checkin (after an initial convo to determine fit—I'll be doing this on a volunteer basis with a smallish chunk of time, which means I may need to prioritize folks based on where I feel the most useful).

Disclaimer: this is an experiment—I've never done this before, and giving good advice is hard, so I can't guarantee that I'll be useful :)