We’re in a growth phase right now, with around 40 people and the first internal team leads now a year or two into their roles. Some of them are showing performance gaps we need to challenge harder. Looking deeper into those teams, I realized we’d been telling ourselves a story that doesn’t quite hold up.

The story went like this: our success with new hires came from two sources. A strong selection process and a strong onboarding. The selection process really had improved over the years. A combination of structured interviews and standardized assessments, refined slowly over time. On top of that we built a six-month onboarding program covering technical, HR, and general elements. The conclusion sounded almost obvious: we find good people, and then we develop them into stars.

A handful of new hires who didn’t work out forced me to look at this more honestly. In two teams, people had stayed for months without growing in the direction we needed. A more critical evaluation surfaced what had actually been happening: we were mostly good at hiring self-starters. People with agency who wanted to dig into things, and who happened to be talented.

For the few who didn’t develop, we had usually had mixed feelings about the hire from the start, and we’d quietly assumed our program and the demanding environment would do the rest. There were genuine exceptions. People we did manage to develop internally. But every single one of those cases had external coaching that we paid for. The success probably belongs less to our polished onboarding and more to the external coaches.

The onboarding program wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t a development system. It was a structure that helped already-good people become productive faster.

What I’m taking from this: figuring out why something is actually working tends to fall through the cracks, because there’s always a fire to put out. If you don’t ask that question on purpose, you’ll draw the wrong lessons from your wins. The second point, which is the more uncomfortable one, is that it can make sense to buy coaching and development externally when you yourself aren’t yet the dominant lever for it. That’s not an admission you’ll never learn how. I’m actively working on this muscle. But neglecting an important lever for ego reasons is the more expensive option. Open question I’m still sitting with: at what team size does this flip, and when does systematic internal development actually become the better lever?