David Cramer

If you’ve interacted in the product strategy sessions, you’ll find I’ve historically been opposed to A/B testing - to running behavioral experiments.

...Now you might ask, why would I be opposed to such a thing within our product? There are many, many reasons I am opposed, but the one we should care about is how it fosters a culture of decision paralysis. It fosters a culture of decision making without having an opinion, without having to put a stake in the ground. It fosters a culture where making a quick buck trumps a great product experience. That goes wildly against our core values, how we built Sentry, and what we want Sentry to be. Pixels Matter, one of our core values, is centered around caring about the small details, and that by its very nature is subjective. What details? Which ones matter? Those decisions all center on taste, and around someone making a subjective decision.

Early on at Sentry I attended an event with a number of seasoned CEOs and leaders, including one of whom worked under two sitting US presidents. They will tell you the same thing I’m telling you today: everyone makes the mistake of hiring the wrong people, and then failing to terminate the relationship in earnest. We do this because we want to give people a chance - to coach them. We do this because we want to avoid conflict. We do this because we lack confidence in our decisions. Then, when we do this, we create a mess of problems for organizations, sometimes even dooming them.

This is where the Fire Fast mentality comes into play, and anyone will happily nod along and say “yeah stop hiring shitty people”. The problem with leaving the conversation there, is often people fail to address the problems that got us into those situations. What would you have done differently to avoid hiring the wrong person? It’s a pretty straight forward question, but it’s not one that’s always easy to answer. There are however some really common scenarios that I’ve lived through, so I want to give some direct-from-the-source tips today.