When You Can’t Fit Engineering in One Room Anymore: A Practical RFC Playbook
January 23, 2026When a company grows past 50 people, hiring changes. It is no longer just “add people to grow faster.” Hiring starts to impact how the whole company works.
Here are the hiring mistakes I see most often, and how you can avoid them.
Hiring for “famous names” instead of the right fit
A common mistake is hiring people from big companies because their CV looks impressive, and safe.
But many scaleup jobs are not the same than in big companies. They are about laying the tracks while still delivering results. Things change fast, priorities move, and there may not be much process. You need people who can bring structure without slowing everything down.
How to avoid it: hire for flexibility, ownership, and good judgment when things are unclear. Look for people who have built things in messy environments, not only worked in large and well-organized ones. A strong brand on a CV can help, but it is not enough.
Hiring without a clear reason
After raising money, it is easy to hire because you can.
But hiring without a real need is expensive and risky. If a role is not solving a clear problem, a good person may end up waiting, repeating work, or creating extra meetings and rules to stay busy. That is when politics grow and progress slows.
How to avoid it: for every role, write one clear sentence: “We are hiring this role now because it removes this bottleneck and helps us reach this outcome.” Also consider if you could automate the reason you are hiring that person, specially nowadays with AI tools evolving rapidly, do you still need that role? If you cannot write that sentence or you are unsure if it could be automated, wait.
Not being clear about ownership and decisions
Good hires fail when the system around them is unclear.
Who is responsible for results? What can leaders decide on their own? How do teams decide when Product, Engineering, and Sales disagree? If the answers are unclear, strong people will either stop moving or spend time fighting for clarity.
How to avoid it: define ownership and decision rules before you add more people. Be clear about who owns what, who must be asked for input, and how conflicts are solved.
Hiring specialists too early
Security, data, and platform experts can be important. But timing matters.
If your main product teams are not delivering smoothly, hiring a specialist can create friction. The specialist wants high standards, but the rest of the company may not be ready. The specialist feels blocked, teams feel slowed down, and the CEO ends up solving conflicts. Sounds familiar?
How to avoid it: build a stable delivery rhythm first. Then hire specialists when the company can use their work properly, not just be impressed by it.
Weak onboarding and poor context
Many leaders underestimate how costly “no onboarding” is.
Without a clear plan, basic documents, and time to learn, new hires take much longer to become useful. At the same time, leaders get interrupted constantly to answer questions. That slows everyone down.
How to avoid it: treat onboarding as a leadership job, not just an HR task. Give each new hire clear answers: what matters now, how decisions are made, who they should learn from, and what success looks like in 30, 60, and 90 days. If possible, define an indicator to track onboarding. For example, I really like the time to 10th PR metric from Laura Tacho .
Hiring without a 6 to 12 month plan
If you do not know what you will build next, where the product must scale, and what matters most, every hire is a guess.
You can grow the team and still lack direction. Then you try to fix it with more meetings, more process, and reorgs. That is how speed disappears.
How to avoid it: keep it simple. Agree on the next 6 to 12 months: the few product goals that matter, the key technical challenges, and the skills you need. Hiring should follow the plan, not replace it.
Hiring at the wrong level
A very senior leader expects big scope and real authority. A more junior leader needs support, clear structure, and a smaller job.
If the role and the level do not match, people leave quickly. It also damages trust, because the company starts doubting its hiring choices.
How to avoid it: be honest about what the job really is. If it is hands-on work, say so. If it is leading across teams, make sure the person will truly have that authority.
Interviewing for the wrong things
Many interviews still focus on trivia, “best practices,” or debating opinions.
But scaleups need people who can handle unclear situations, take ownership, make tradeoffs, communicate simply, and bring order to chaos.
How to avoid it: interview less for what people know, and more for how they work. The goal is not more interviews. The goal is better signals.
The CEO move: check your plan before you hire
If you do one thing, do this: review your growth plan and turn it into a clear hiring logic.
Ask:
- What is the biggest bottleneck right now: product delivery, revenue, reliability, speed, or leadership time?
- What must be true in 6 to 12 months for us to win?
- Which roles remove real constraints, and which roles only add complexity?
Hiring is not just growth. The best scaleups do not win by hiring faster. They win by hiring with clarity.
