Investing in tools and process
Optimizing hiring, onboarding, and workflows can drive success. Lessons from Raizlabs on speed, efficiency, and reducing friction to improve outcomes.
When I was running my first company, Raizlabs, we spent a lot of time optimizing how we hired. The experience of hiring and being hired was scrutinized from all angles. Our goal was to take what started as a 30+ day process and refine it to make a great decision and extend an offer within seven days.
The objective wasn’t to make poor hires or rush decisions. We aimed to improve both the process and the candidate experience, recognizing that accelerating the hiring of great talent would pay dividends across the entire company.
On their first day, we set clear expectations for developers. Yes, there would be email and Slack setup, HR forms, and onboarding processes, but above all, they had to commit code. Fix a bug, correct a typo, address something minor—but the tone we set was clear: we get things done.
From hiring to day one, investing in the right processes can feel like a chore or even unnecessary. Taken too far, you can over-optimize, but done right, these foundational steps make your goals more achievable, no matter how small.
Earlier this week, I posted about my goal to write more this year. In reflecting on that, I realized that when I updated my website blog a few years ago, I made a mistake. When I transitioned from wordpress to a Jekyll blog, I optimized for performance, load speed, and the tech stack—but not for writing. Creating a new post became a hassle, so I simply didn’t do it.
Today that’s fixed. Cereating content should be as easy as deploying it. One-button deployments are a touch of upfront work but a long-tail of savings. If you expect to be doing something a lot, take a second to optimize.