Your next hiring sprint needs a roadmap, not guesswork
There’s a moment almost every post-seed to Series A/B founder hits.
The team is stretched.
There are early signs of burnout.
Investors are asking about “key hires”.
You’ve got some referrals sitting untouched.
So the instinctive answer is simple:
“Let’s hire some Account Execs. And a CSM. And a couple of engineers…at least. We just need more people.”
On the surface, that sounds rational. You’re growing. Everyone is busy. You’ve raised money to build a team.
But this is exactly the point where most founders quietly create a huge amount of People Debt.
Not because they’re careless.
Because they go into a hiring sprint with no hiring roadmap.
The default: structured panic disguised as a hiring plan
Here’s what I see again and again.
A founder decides, often under pressure, that they “need” a set of roles:
“We should probably get a product manager.”
“A Founder’s Associate would take a load off me.”
“We’ll need customer success soon, let’s add that.”
If you scratch beneath the surface and ask why, you get something like:
“I just think that’s what we need now.”
Behind the scenes, the picture often looks like this:
No clear link between proposed roles and concrete business milestones
No honest view of current capacity and capability
No sequencing – everything feels equally urgent
No realistic assessment of the team’s ability to hire, onboard and ramp multiple people at once
So you end up with what looks like a plan – but is actually structured panic.
Job descriptions are copy-pasted.
The interview process is vague and repetitive.
Candidates get asked the same questions by different people.
Decisions are made on “vibes” and gut feel.
Best case, you get lucky.
Worst case, three to six months later you’re holding:
Mis-hires or half-onboarded people who never quite ramp
A team still drowning in work because they’re covering gaps
More burnout, not less
Questions from your board about why things still haven’t moved, despite “all these new hires”
And underneath that is a founder who now feels stuck with the consequences of their own plan.
A real example: from “we just need more people” to an actual roadmap
A founder I worked with recently arrived at exactly this point.
Everyone on the team was busy.
There were genuine signals of burnout.
They had warm investor and advisor leads going to waste because nobody owned them.
They knew, correctly, that something had to change.
The obvious part was clear: they needed a founding Account Executive to convert those warm leads. That wasn’t a hard decision.
The trouble started when the founder added:
“I think I also want a product manager, a Founder’s Associate, a customer success manager…”
When I asked, “Why? What business goals do you have that these roles will unlock? What problems can’t your current team solve through optimisation?” the answer started to unravel.
They “just felt” they needed those roles.
So instead of rushing to market with a half-formed hiring spree, we paused and built a Hiring Roadmap.
What changed when we built a Hiring Roadmap
We started from the business, not the wish list.
Together we:
Mapped the next 12 months of business goals
Revenue, product milestones, expansion bets, key proof points for the next round.
Did a clear-eyed review of current capacity and capability
Who can genuinely take on more? Where are the real bottlenecks? What is already working that could be optimised?
Separated “this is a process problem” from “this is a hiring problem”
Two of the roles on the original list turned out not to be hiring problems at all. The team already knew how to fix the issues – they just hadn’t had the focus or support.
Sequenced the real priority hires
Instead of “we need all of these people now”, we created an order:
Priority now
Priority next
Backlog / revisit later
Brought the team into the picture
We involved key team members in scoping the priority role. Their insight sharpened what “good” really needed to look like and increased buy-in.
Designed an end-to-end hiring process for the priority role
From a clear, accurate role scope and job description through to interview stages, competencies, questions and scorecards.
The result?
The founder realised they didn’t need to hire everything at once.
Two roles were removed entirely – they were process issues, not headcount issues.
The remaining roles were sequenced realistically against the team’s actual ability to hire, onboard and ramp.
The team felt heard and more engaged because their knowledge was finally being used.
The founder had a plan they could confidently defend to investors and communicate clearly to the team.
Crucially, the founder stopped feeling like they were staring at an avalanche of roles with no way through.
The hidden cost of getting this wrong
There’s the obvious cost of a mis-hire: salary, recruiter fees, time.
But in early-stage companies the real cost is wider:
Time spent sourcing, screening and interviewing the wrong person
Lost opportunity while a role is unfilled or underperforming
Extra load on the founder and the team to cover gaps
Emotional and cultural drag when someone clearly isn’t working out
The cost of unwinding the mistake and starting again
Even conservatively, many estimates put the cost of a mis-hire at 1.5–2x annual salary once you factor in all of the above for a senior IC or lead-level hire.
For a £90k role, that’s easily £135k–£180k tied up in one bad decision.
And that’s before you count the impact on a small team’s morale and your ability to hit the milestones you promised investors.
What a Hiring Roadmap Sprint actually gives you
The point of the Hiring Roadmap Sprint isn’t a pretty spreadsheet.
It’s to change how you, your leadership team and your board think about and execute hiring.
By the end of a Sprint, you have:
A 12-month hiring roadmap linked directly to your business plan
Not just “we need a PM”, but “we’re hiring this role to hit this milestone by this date.”
A clear view of where to optimise vs where to hire
You know which problems can be solved through better process or focus, and where headcount is genuinely the right answer.
Prioritised and sequenced roles
You understand what needs to come first, what can wait, and what’s on the backlog until certain conditions are met.
A fully scoped, end-to-end hiring plan for your number one priority role
Role scope and outcomes
Job description that actually reflects reality
Up to four interview stages mapped
Competencies defined and aligned
Question bank and scorecards for interviewers
Trained interviewers across your company
So you’re no longer relying on vibes and repeated “So tell me about yourself” questions. People know how to probe, gather real signals and feed into a structured decision.
Reusable assets
Question banks, rubrics and a simple six-step process you can run every quarter or at your annual offsite.
This isn’t a one-off exercise that sits in Notion and gathers dust. It’s a repeatable operating rhythm you can run with your exec team whenever your plan or the market shifts
The real shift: from back foot to front foot
Most founders are confident explaining product, revenue and GTM strategy to their board.
Hiring is where they end up on the back foot:
“Why haven’t you made those key hires yet?”
“What’s happening with those warm referrals we sent you?”
“Why is the team so stretched when you’ve added headcount?”
A Hiring Roadmap puts you back on the front foot.
You can say:
“Here’s exactly who we’re hiring, in what order and why.”
“Here’s where we’re deliberately choosing to optimise instead of hiring.”
“Here’s how you can actually help – the intros we need, the profiles we’re targeting.”
And internally:
Your team knows the plan.
They know which roles are coming and when.
They understand their role in assessing and onboarding those people.
That clarity alone reduces stress and noise significantly.
If you’re about to go on a hiring sprint
If you’re a post-seed to Series A/B founder and you’re about to ramp hiring, this is the moment to pause and get intentional.
Ask yourself:
Do we have a clear view of current capacity and capability?
Do we know which problems are process problems vs genuine hiring problems?
Can I show a direct line from each proposed hire to a business milestone?
Do we have the capacity to hire, onboard and ramp this number of people in this timeframe?
Could I confidently explain this plan to my team, my investors and my board?
If the honest answer is “not really” – that’s exactly where the Hiring Roadmap Sprint comes in.
We step through a simple, structured process to answer those questions properly, build a 12-month roadmap, and fully scope your top priority role so you can execute with confidence.
If this is the stage you’re at and you’d like to sanity-check your hiring sprint before you lock it in, send me a note or message me with “roadmap” and I’ll happily walk you through how the Sprint works and whether it’s the right fit.