Overhiring creates work that shouldn't exist

Hyper realistic work-like activities is superficially identical to work. We are sitting in a conference room and there's something being projected up there, and we're all talking about it. But this is actually a fake bit of work.

If you hire 17 product marketers, you're going to have 17 product marketers worth of demand for work to do. And if you don't have sufficient supply of product marketing work to do, they're just going to do other stuff.

When you hire for a role and you already have enough people there, you get a lot of weird politics that ultimately ends up happening. They will go out and manufacture some other thing that they should go work on.

There is no question that a lot of companies overhired during the pandemic. I go into some companies and honestly I can't believe all the ridiculous roles that they have, agile coaches and product owners and product ops and business analysts.

People were describing working 80 hours and getting 20 hours of productive work done, which is just a crazy ratio a week.

Being really thoughtful around how do we not over-hire? How are we really clear about, again, these milestones of we got to get through these gates, we got to be able to show these types of results, and then we unlock hiring in X, Y, Z ways?

Just because laying off half your team is a terrible feeling. Literally having hired people and then having to let them go, it's not something you want to do.