Category: Team

Hiring Moz Startups Team

Some Thoughts on Firing Employees

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This past week, I read a terrific Quora thread on firing. The depth and breadth of answers shows the wide range of opinions and practices on the subject, and it made me think about the topic for this blog. Companies are rarely transparent about how and why they let people go, so hopefully we can be an exception here, at…
Hiring Startups Team

When Brilliant Minds Become Brilliant Jerks

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The NYTimes Bits Blog has a worthwhile read from last week entitled “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerks?” I’d encourage startup founders and team members to take 8 minutes and read it thoroughly. On its face, the article didn’t strike me as especially controversial, but the comments(and some of the responses on social media) tell a different story.…
Hiring Team

Interview Questions and Interview Strategy

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s struck me of late that many smart companies with reputations for giving tough interviews are weirdly anti-strategic in their approach to interview questions. Chatting with folks from across our organization (and a few others) who’ve done their fair share of interviewing with Google, Amazon, Boeing, the US State Department, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’m struck by what seems like a…
Startups Team

It’s Not Just Technical Debt; Everything Gets Painful & Slow as You Scale

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A tremendous amount gets written about technical debt (definition) in the startup ecosystem. As you scale your product and engineering, you inevitably make sacrifices for the sake of speed that lead to pain down the road. What startups (and people who interact with them) don’t often realize is that this same problem happens across nearly every team and every form…
Hiring Startups Team

The Uncomfortable Challenge of Topgrading Your Startup’s Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If things go well at your startup, there will inevitably be a point where the business is growing ahead of the team’s abilities. Engineers will find themselves facing architectural, scaling, and complexity issues they’ve never dealt with before. Marketers will discover their historical strengths dwarfed by the quantity and complexity of different customer acquisition channels and the huge challenges of…
Team

Making Performance Reviews Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
We’re doing performance reviews at SEOmoz right now. It’s tough, because on the one hand, I agree with a lot of the general criticism of traditional reviews and I’ve seen plenty of data to suggest that classic reviews can have negatives that outweigh their value. Some good reading on that here: 1, 2, 3, and 4. On the other side,…
Moz Team

Diving Deep on TAGFEE

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For the last 5 years, SEOmoz has lived by a set of core values collectively referred to as TAGFEE. The acronym represents the values we hold to be more important than any particular business goal (such as revenue, growth, margins, etc). And, though we believe that these values will help us be more successful in achieving those business-minded goals, we…
Moz Startups Team

What’s the Right Team Structure?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
As I often note on this blog, I’m a rookie CEO who’s gotten very lucky. Much of the time, I wish I had more experience in other corporate and startup environments, so I’d better know what works and what doesn’t. I rely on other team members and a lot of outside advice for that, and I’ve been thinking that maybe,…

Keep up with SparkToro®