Building & Scaling Teams

Building a team is one thing. Scaling it is another. The approaches that work with five people break down at fifteen. The structures that serve fifteen become obstacles at fifty. As a Product Director, you will likely experience multiple phases of team growth, each requiring different skills and mindsets.

This chapter covers the full arc of team building: hiring the right people, structuring teams for effectiveness, scaling without losing what made you successful, and navigating the unique dynamics of growth. In an AI-augmented world, some traditional scaling assumptions no longer hold, which creates both challenges and opportunities.

The Philosophy of Team Building

Before diving into tactics, it helps to establish a philosophy. What kind of team are you trying to build? What values will guide your decisions?

I believe in building teams where the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. This means hiring people who complement each other, creating an environment where collaboration is natural, and developing shared practices that amplify individual capabilities.

I also believe in hiring for trajectory over current position. A high-potential person who is growing rapidly will outperform a more experienced person who has plateaued. Energy, curiosity, and coachability matter enormously.

Finally, I believe that culture is not separate from performance. The teams I have seen succeed over the long term are ones where people genuinely enjoy working together, trust each other, and share a commitment to excellence. Culture and results reinforce each other.

Hiring: The Most Important Thing You Do

Every hiring decision shapes your team for years. A great hire elevates everyone around them. A poor hire creates drag that consumes management attention, damages morale, and slows progress. There is no more leveraged activity than hiring well.

What to Look For

When evaluating candidates, I focus on a combination of demonstrated capability and underlying character. Skills can be developed, but character is largely fixed.

Passion and drive. You need people with a combustion engine inside. This does not mean they need to be passionate about your specific company today, but they need to be driven by something. High-energy people who are motivated to achieve will figure out how to succeed. It is much easier to channel existing drive toward your mission than to ignite drive that is not there.

Look for evidence of passion in their history. What have they pursued with intensity? Where have they gone above and beyond? What gets them excited when they talk about it?

Coachability. The best hires are people who actively seek feedback and use it to improve. They are not defensive when given criticism. They ask clarifying questions. They follow up to show they have incorporated the feedback.

Coachability is especially important in a rapidly changing environment. AI is transforming how product work gets done. People who are rigid in their approaches will struggle. People who are eager to learn and adapt will thrive.

Mission alignment. People who care about what you are building will bring discretionary effort that cannot be demanded. They will think about problems in the shower. They will go the extra mile because they want the product to succeed, not just because it is their job.

This does not mean everyone needs to be a true believer. But there should be genuine interest in the problem space and the customers you serve.

Courage. Product management requires saying no, pushing back on stakeholders, delivering bad news, and making unpopular decisions. People who avoid conflict or tell others what they want to hear will struggle. Look for evidence that candidates have taken difficult stands and navigated hard conversations.

Intellectual horsepower. Product management involves synthesizing complex information, identifying patterns, and making decisions under uncertainty. Raw intelligence matters. This does not mean hiring only from elite schools, but it does mean assessing whether candidates can think clearly and rigorously.

Collaboration orientation. PMs succeed through others. They must build relationships with engineering, design, and stakeholders across the company. Look for evidence that candidates have worked effectively in team environments and can influence without authority.

The Interview Process

A good interview process is both rigorous and respectful. It should give you confidence in your decision while leaving candidates with a positive impression of your team.

Structured interviews produce better outcomes than unstructured conversations. Define the competencies you are assessing and design questions that reveal them. Use the same questions for all candidates so you can compare fairly.

Work samples are more predictive than hypothetical questions. Ask candidates to walk through a real product decision they made, a PRD they wrote, or a problem they solved. Better yet, give them a realistic exercise that simulates the actual work.

Multiple perspectives reduce individual bias. Have candidates meet with several team members who assess different dimensions. Debrief together and surface disagreements.

Reference checks are underutilized. Most people only call the references candidates provide, who will obviously be positive. Try to find back-channel references: people who worked with the candidate but were not provided as references. These conversations are far more revealing.

Sell as well as assess. Great candidates have options. Throughout the process, help them understand why your team and mission are compelling. The best interviews feel like genuine conversations, not interrogations.

Hiring in the AI Age

AI changes what you should look for in candidates. Some skills that were valuable are becoming commoditized. Others are becoming more important.

AI fluency is now essential. Candidates should demonstrate comfort with AI tools and an understanding of how AI can augment their work. This does not mean they need to be AI experts, but they should not be AI skeptics or avoiders.

Judgment becomes more valuable. When AI can generate competent first drafts of almost anything, the ability to evaluate, refine, and make good decisions about AI output becomes critical. Look for evidence of strong judgment and critical thinking.

Learning agility matters more. The AI landscape is evolving rapidly. The specific tools candidates know today may be obsolete in a year. What matters is their ability to learn new tools quickly and adapt their workflows.

Communication skills remain essential. AI augments but does not replace the need for clear communication with humans. In fact, as AI handles more routine work, the distinctly human work of alignment, persuasion, and relationship building becomes more important.

Common Hiring Mistakes

I have made many hiring mistakes over the years. Here are patterns to avoid.

Hiring for current needs only. Think about where your team will be in two years, not just today. Will this person grow with the team or become a limiting factor?

Overweighting credentials. Impressive resumes do not guarantee strong performance. Focus on what candidates have actually accomplished and how they think, not where they went to school or which companies they worked for.

Ignoring culture fit. A brilliant person who does not work well with your team will create more problems than they solve. Culture fit does not mean hiring people who are all alike, but it does mean hiring people who share core values and can collaborate effectively.

Rushing to fill a role. The pain of an open position tempts you to lower the bar. Resist this. A bad hire is worse than no hire. Keep looking until you find someone you are genuinely excited about.

Not involving the team. Your team has to work with whoever you hire. Their input is valuable, and their buy-in matters. Include them in the process.

Structuring Teams for Effectiveness

How you organize your product team significantly impacts what it can accomplish. There is no single right structure, but there are principles that help.

Team Topologies

Product teams can be organized in several ways:

Product-aligned teams own specific products or product areas end-to-end. This creates clear ownership and accountability. It works well when products are relatively independent and can be developed without heavy coordination.

Customer-aligned teams own the experience for specific customer segments. This makes sense when different customers have fundamentally different needs that warrant dedicated focus.

Journey-aligned teams own specific parts of the customer journey: acquisition, activation, retention, and so on. This works well for products where the journey has distinct phases requiring specialized focus.

Platform teams build capabilities that other teams use. This makes sense when there are shared needs that would otherwise be duplicated across product teams.

Most organizations use some combination of these. The key is ensuring that every important outcome has a clear owner and that teams can operate with reasonable autonomy.

Team Size

The ideal team size depends on context, but some patterns hold generally.

Small teams move faster. Communication overhead grows exponentially with team size. A team of five can coordinate informally. A team of fifteen needs more process.

Amazon's two-pizza rule suggests teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. This is a useful heuristic, though not a strict law.

AI changes the calculus. With AI augmentation, smaller teams can accomplish more than before. This argues for smaller teams with higher individual leverage rather than larger teams with more specialization.

Balance autonomy and alignment. Teams need to be large enough to have the skills required for autonomy, but small enough to maintain cohesion and speed.

The PM-to-Engineer Ratio

A common question is how many PMs you need relative to engineers. Traditional ratios ranged from 1:5 to 1:10 or higher. AI is changing this in two ways.

First, engineers with AI assistance are more productive, which might argue for fewer PMs per engineer. But second, AI also augments PM work, making each PM more effective. The net effect varies by context.

More important than any ratio is ensuring that PMs can give adequate attention to their products and teams. If a PM is spread too thin, quality suffers. If they have too little scope, they become overhead.

Cross-Functional Integration

Product teams work best when product, engineering, and design are tightly integrated. This can be achieved through:

Embedded models where designers and dedicated engineers are part of the product team, reporting into their functions but working daily with the PM.

Pod structures where small cross-functional groups work together on specific initiatives, forming and reforming as needed.

Shared rituals like sprint planning, retrospectives, and reviews that bring cross-functional team members together regularly.

The goal is for product, engineering, and design to feel like one team with shared goals, not three functions coordinating across boundaries.

Scaling: The Challenges of Growth

Growth creates challenges that do not exist in smaller teams. What worked before stops working. Coordination becomes harder. Culture dilutes. As a leader, you must recognize these challenges and address them proactively.

The Stages of Scale

Teams go through recognizable stages as they grow.

Founding team (2-5 people). Everyone knows everything. Communication is constant and informal. There is no need for process because coordination happens naturally. This is the most productive phase per person, but it does not scale.

Early growth (5-15 people). You can no longer rely on everyone knowing everything. Some structure becomes necessary: regular meetings, documented decisions, clearer roles. The challenge is adding just enough structure without killing the speed and flexibility that made you successful.

Scaling (15-50 people). Teams need to split into sub-teams. You cannot manage everyone directly. Middle management layers appear. Culture must be explicitly maintained because it no longer transmits automatically. This is often the hardest phase because you are letting go of what worked before.

At scale (50+ people). You are managing managers. Your job becomes setting direction, building systems, and maintaining culture rather than direct product work. The team has its own momentum that you shape but do not directly control.

What Breaks as You Scale

Communication. Information that flowed freely in a small team gets siloed. People make decisions without context. Misalignments emerge that were not possible when everyone was in the same room.

Speed. More people means more coordination. Decisions that one person used to make now require meetings. Dependencies multiply.

Culture. When you hire faster than you can onboard, culture dilutes. New people do not absorb the values and practices that made the team special. You end up with subcultures that may conflict.

Quality. Standards that were implicitly understood need to be explicitly documented. Otherwise, quality becomes inconsistent as people interpret expectations differently.

Your effectiveness. Approaches that worked when you knew everyone and everything stop working. You must learn to lead through others rather than doing things yourself.

Strategies for Scaling Successfully

Hire leaders, not just doers. As you grow, you need people who can lead sub-teams, not just individual contributors. Identify leadership potential early and develop it.

Document what matters. Culture, standards, processes that were implicit need to become explicit. Write them down. Not everything, but the things that really matter.

Create scalable rituals. All-hands meetings, planning cycles, review processes that work at your current size. Design them to scale.

Invest in onboarding. New people need to understand your culture, standards, and ways of working. Do not leave this to chance. Create structured onboarding that transmits what matters.

Maintain direct connections. Even as you add layers, find ways to stay connected to the work and the people. Skip-level meetings, office hours, working sessions on specific problems. Do not become isolated at the top.

Evolve your role. What the team needs from you changes as it grows. Be willing to let go of activities you enjoy but that are no longer the best use of your time.

Scaling in the AI Age

AI changes the scaling equation in important ways.

Smaller Teams, Bigger Impact

As discussed in Chapter 12, AI enables smaller teams to accomplish more. This has implications for scaling strategy.

You may not need to hire as many people as traditional models suggest. A team of ten with strong AI fluency might accomplish what previously required thirty. This changes your hiring strategy, your org structure, and your cost model.

But it also raises the bar for each hire. When you have fewer people, each one matters more. You cannot afford passengers. Every person needs to be a strong contributor who leverages AI effectively.

New Scaling Challenges

AI creates new challenges as you scale:

Consistency of AI usage. Different team members may use AI in different ways, leading to inconsistent quality or approaches. You need shared practices and standards.

Knowledge management. AI works better with good documentation and context. As teams grow, maintaining the knowledge base that AI draws on becomes important.

Quality control. More AI-generated work means more work to review. You need systems for quality assurance that scale.

Skill development. How do you develop junior people when AI handles tasks they used to learn from? This requires rethinking career development paths.

AI as a Scaling Tool

AI can help with scaling challenges:

Onboarding. AI can help new team members get up to speed faster by answering questions, explaining context, and providing guidance.

Documentation. AI can help maintain and improve documentation, keeping it current as the team evolves.

Knowledge sharing. AI can help surface relevant information and connect people with expertise, partially compensating for the knowledge silos that emerge in larger teams.

Process automation. Routine coordination tasks can be partially automated, reducing the overhead that typically comes with scale.

Building Culture

Culture is not a poster on the wall. It is how people actually behave, especially when no one is watching. As a leader, you shape culture through what you pay attention to, what you reward, what you tolerate, and how you behave yourself.

Defining Your Culture

Be intentional about the culture you want to create. What values matter most? What behaviors do you want to encourage? What will you not tolerate?

For product teams, I believe certain cultural elements are particularly important:

Customer obsession. Decisions should start with customer needs, not internal convenience or opinion.

Intellectual honesty. People should say what they really think, acknowledge uncertainty, and change their minds when evidence warrants.

Bias for action. Movement beats perfection. Ship, learn, iterate.

Collaboration over territory. Success is shared. Helping others succeed is valued.

Continuous improvement. Yesterday's best is today's baseline. Always look for ways to get better.

Maintaining Culture Through Growth

Culture naturally dilutes as teams grow. Maintaining it requires active effort.

Hire for culture. Every person you add either strengthens or weakens your culture. Make cultural alignment a real criterion, not an afterthought.

Onboard for culture. Do not assume new people will absorb culture by osmosis. Explicitly teach the values, behaviors, and expectations that define your team.

Recognize and reward cultural behaviors. What gets celebrated gets repeated. Publicly recognize people who exemplify your values.

Address cultural violations. When people behave in ways that contradict your values, address it. Tolerating bad behavior signals that culture is not real.

Model the culture yourself. Your behavior is the strongest signal. If you want intellectual honesty, be intellectually honest. If you want collaboration, collaborate.

The Realities of Recruiting

I should be honest: recruiting is not my strongest suit. I have found the best approach is to partner with strong external recruiters for key hires while building internal capabilities for ongoing hiring.

Some lessons I have learned:

Your network ages with you. The people in your network become more senior and less mobile over time. You need to continuously build relationships with rising talent, not just rely on people you have known for years.

Selling matters. Great candidates have options. You need to be compelling about why they should join you. This means being able to articulate your mission, your culture, and the opportunity in ways that resonate.

Speed matters. Good candidates do not stay on the market long. A slow process loses candidates to faster-moving competitors.

Employer brand matters. Your reputation in the market affects who applies and who accepts. Invest in how your team is perceived externally.

Referrals are gold. The best hires often come from referrals by people already on your team. Create systems to encourage and reward referrals.

Key Takeaways

Building and scaling teams is foundational to your success as a Product Director. You accomplish nothing alone. Everything flows through the team you build.

Hire for passion, coachability, mission alignment, and courage. In the AI age, also hire for AI fluency and learning agility. Take hiring seriously because every decision shapes your team for years.

Structure teams for clarity, autonomy, and cross-functional collaboration. AI enables smaller teams with bigger impact, so consider whether traditional scaling models still apply.

Anticipate the challenges of growth. What works at one stage breaks at the next. Be willing to evolve your approach as the team scales.

Build culture intentionally. Define what matters, hire for it, onboard for it, reward it, and model it yourself. Culture does not maintain itself; it requires constant attention.

The teams you build will outlast your tenure. The people you develop will go on to build their own teams. This is how your impact multiplies beyond what you could ever accomplish yourself.