People

At ten people, every decision about people lives in the founder's head. Who to hire, what number to say when salary comes up, what the new person does in their first week — all decided in the moment, none of it written down. With one decider the method is fast.

Past forty people the same method starts producing results nobody can defend. At one company two engineers doing the same job were paid about seven thousand dollars apart, and the only explanation was that one had walked in with a competing offer and the other had accepted the first number they heard. Nobody broke a rule. The rule lived in one person's memory, so it came out differently every time.

The same thing happens well outside hiring. A new joiner once spent half their first day with no laptop and no accounts, because finance assumed engineering was setting up the accounts and engineering assumed finance was sending the machine.

People is the field that gathers those scattered judgment calls and turns them into standards. Who gets hired at which level, how someone new gets up to speed, what counts as work done well, and what that work is worth in money — each is decided in advance and written down. The goal is less that any single decision gets smarter and more that the same situation stops producing different answers.

The work under this axis splits in two. One part is the people who do the work itself. The rest follows a single person's path through a company — arriving, settling, staying, leaving — and divides into nine branches: hiring, onboarding, organization, growth, evaluation, compensation, work policy, culture, and retention.

Roles are the branch that sorts the practitioners, and it holds five seats. They differ on two lines: whole company or one part of it, hiring only or everything.

1. HR manager — runs the whole span of personnel work, from putting up a job posting to employment contracts, payroll, and leave tracking. When a company has exactly one person responsible for people, this is the seat they sit in.
2. People operations — covers the same ground from the design side. Rather than processing cases one at a time, it reshapes what employees actually experience: the first-week sequence, the shape of the review cycle.
3. Recruiter — hiring and nothing else. Finds candidates and contacts them directly, keeps interview scheduling moving, and carries a candidate through to the offer, meaning the formal proposal of terms for joining. It is the first seat to split off once a company hires more than twenty people a year.
4. HR business partner (HRBP) — an HR person attached to one part of the organization. Assigned to engineering, they sit in that group's meetings and work through hiring, reviews, and attrition with its leader. The seat exists to fit one group's situation, not to write company-wide policy.
5. Chief human resources officer (CHRO) — the executive over the entire people organization. The decisions here involve company-level cost and structure: next year's total payroll, or a reorganization that moves whole teams.

Hiring covers everything from the moment a seat opens to the new person's first day, and it carries more sub-terms than any other branch on this axis. The flow of hiring runs in order: write the posting, gather candidates, filter through résumés and interviews and take-home work, extend an offer, get it accepted. Candidates arrive through three channels — people who apply after seeing the posting, referrals from current employees, and sourcing, where a recruiter goes looking and reaches out first. Whether it's working is read from two numbers: how long it takes from posting to start date, and what share of offers get accepted. When both numbers get worse together, the cause usually sits in front of the interview, in the posting or the salary range.

Onboarding covers the stretch between joining and carrying a real share of the work. Employee onboarding includes preboarding, where equipment and accounts get prepared before the start date; a buddy, one experienced person assigned to answer the small questions; and a 30-60-90 plan, which writes down what the first thirty, sixty, and ninety days should produce. The time it takes to reach full contribution is called ramp-up. A new engineer shipping their first code in three days at one company and three weeks at another usually reflects preparation, not ability.

Organization covers where people get placed. Organizational structure comes in three common shapes: functional, grouping people by discipline; product-oriented, grouping them around a product or a goal; and matrix, laying both axes over each other. Around it sit span of control, the number of people one manager holds; headcount, the number of seats a group is allowed to fill; and reorganization, the act of redrawing the whole thing. A manager with twelve reports who holds a thirty-minute one-on-one with each of them every other week spends twelve hours a month on those conversations alone, and that time comes out of their own hands-on work.

Growth covers where a person can go next. A career framework is built from job levels, sorted by skill and responsibility; job families, which group similar kinds of work; an individual contributor track, where someone advances on expertise without managing anyone, alongside a manager track, where they advance by taking on people; plus promotion and internal transfer. Without this document there is nowhere to answer what comes next, and that question tends to surface months later, in an exit interview.

Evaluation covers deciding what to achieve and then checking what happened, and it is the only branch on this axis holding two sub-terms. Goal setting takes the front half, writing down the direction and the numbers that will confirm it. Objectives and key results (OKR), which splits a goal into a direction and its measures; key performance indicators (KPI), the handful of numbers watched continuously; and SMART, a checklist asking that a goal be specific and measurable, all belong here. Performance management takes the back half, comparing what happened against those goals and adjusting what comes next. It holds the one-on-one, a regular private conversation between a manager and a team member; feedback given in the moment; the performance review, which packages a period into an assessment; and the calibration meeting, where reviewers compare their standards. Evaluate without goals and the reviewer's impression becomes the standard. Set goals without evaluation and the quarter ends with a document nobody reopens.

Compensation covers what a person gets back for the work. Compensation is assembled from base salary, the fixed amount paid every month; variable pay, which moves with results; and equity, a share of the company itself. Salary bands, the ranges set for each level, hold the three together. Equity brings two terms of its own: vesting, where ownership is earned in slices over time, and the cliff, an initial stretch that has to be cleared before any ownership exists. Under four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, someone who leaves at eleven months takes away nothing, and someone who crosses twelve months takes a quarter.

Work policy covers when and where the work happens. Work arrangement includes flexible hours, where people choose their own start and end times; averaged hours schemes, where a total is balanced across a settlement period instead of fixed each day; workations, working from a vacation destination; sabbaticals for long-tenured employees; and unlimited leave, which sets no number of days at all. Policies also fail to behave the way they read. Companies that move to unlimited leave often report that average days taken went down rather than up, because with no stated number nobody can tell how much they can take without it looking like too much.

Culture covers how people behave when the same situation comes around again. Organizational culture holds core values, the tiebreakers used when a judgment call splits; psychological safety, the sense that admitting a mistake or disagreeing openly carries no penalty; and transparency and autonomy. The current state gets measured through engagement surveys and eNPS, or employee net promoter score, which asks whether someone would recommend the company to another person. The warning signs are burnout, where sustained overload drains motivation, and quiet quitting, where someone stays but narrows their work to the minimum. Culture shows up in decisions, not in sentences on a wall. At a company that wrote down a commitment to speaking candidly, the person who raised an objection getting left off the next project is what everyone reads as the real culture.

Retention covers the stretch where a person stays or goes. The employee lifecycle breaks the span from joining to leaving into stages and looks at both the work that keeps people and the procedure for when they go. Turnover rate, the share of employees who left; the exit interview, where the reason gets asked; offboarding, which handles handover and revoking access; and layoffs, cutting headcount for business reasons, together with the severance paid when that happens, all sit here. A forty-five-person company that loses eleven people in a year is running 25 percent turnover, but if five of them came out of one team, that is one team's problem rather than the company's.

The nine branches do not run separately; each one feeds the next. Without salary bands, every hiring negotiation lands somewhere different. Without a career framework, review results have nowhere to go. When reviews wobble, people leave, and when people leave, hiring gets busy again. A problem showing up in one branch often started in the one beside it, which is why this axis gets handled in one place.

"Headcount for this quarter is three. Two engineers and one designer."

Three new hires have been approved, and anything beyond those three needs a fresh approval.

"Where are you putting that candidate's level? What's the top of the band we can offer?"

The salary will come out of the preset range for that level rather than out of how hard the candidate negotiates.

"I don't think that's a problem with the person. I think it's that we have no onboarding."

When new joiners keep getting stuck at the same point, the thing to look at is the gap in the process, not their individual adaptability.

Pagedeck has forty-five people and exactly one person on HR, so most decisions on this axis land with Grace, the CEO. When Grace sets headcount at the start of a quarter, Theo takes the interviews for engineering roles and Mia takes them for product roles.

Last quarter two engineers left back to back. Both exit interview notes said the same thing — they couldn't see what came next — and Pagedeck had no document that defined job levels. Instead of putting up more postings, Grace decided to sit down with Theo and write the level definitions first.

The most common mistake is treating this field as another name for the recruiting team. Postings going up and interviews getting scheduled are visible from outside the company, while designing a review cycle or redrawing salary bands is visible to almost nobody. Hiring is one branch out of nine, and the other eight are all about what happens after someone joins. Read the field as hiring alone and the only thing that gets managed is hiring speed — a company losing eight people for every ten it hires will keep answering with a bigger hiring target.

The other frequent mistake is assuming the systems can wait until the company is larger. At twenty people, writing salary bands looks like overkill, and the judgment that shipping product matters more sounds reasonable. The catch is that a system's cost isn't charged when you build it. It gets charged later, in proportion to how long you went without one. Three years of salaries set one at a time, then an attempt to fit them into bands, means either somebody's pay gets cut or the company spends a large budget at once.