When do I add the next person, and to which seat?
Weight the hires to the top of the funnel. The deep engineering seats compound; the enablement seats hit their ceiling first.
Weight your growth toward the top of the funnel, roughly two or three additions at the enablement and forward-deployed layers for every one at the platform and system layers. The instinct is to scale evenly, one engineer for every enabler, but that gets the ratio backwards.
The reason is leverage. If your system engineer has been building abstracted components, each piece serves many applications rather than one, so a single deep-engineering seat supports a growing pile of work above it without a matching increase in its own load. Enablement and forward-deployed work does not compound that way. It happens one team at a time, which means those seats hit their ceiling first.
So read the queue, not the org chart. When the team is underwater, the constraint is almost never a missing database engineer. It is that the line of departments waiting for someone to sit with them has stretched to three months. That is the signal, and it points at the top of the funnel.
The full team is on The Innovation Engineering Team, and the enablement seat is The AI Product Partner.
Cheers,
-Titus
Get it in your inbox.
New Issues, FAQs, and Case Studies as they go out. Each one names something, explains something, or hands you something you can use on Monday. Subscribe, and I will send each as it goes out.
Prefer the tool you already think in? Here is how to read it in your chatbot.