Map Team Skill Gaps Before Hiring

Nick Turley's approach to building high-performing teams at OpenAI involves treating hiring as a strategic exercise in identifying and filling specific skill gaps rather than defaulting to standard organizational structures.

Team Building Through Skill Gap Analysis

• Focus on identifying the specific skills each team needs rather than defaulting to standard roles

  • "You have to treat hiring a little bit more like executive recruiting and less like just pure pipelined recruiting"
  • "Really understand what is the gap you're trying to fill on each team, what is the specific skill set and how do you fill it"

• Challenge assumptions about which roles are actually needed

  • "Sometimes a team doesn't need a product person because there's already someone doing that role"
  • "In many cases we have a really talented engineering leader who has amazing product sense or we have a researcher who has product ideas"
  • Look for what's actually missing: "Maybe we need a little bit more front end or something like that"

• Optimize for "barrels" over "ammunition"

  • Borrowed from Keith Rabois' concept of "barrels and ammunition"
  • "The throughput of your org depends on how many barrels you have, which is like people who can make stuff happen"
  • "You can add ammunition around them, which is like people helping those people"
  • "That's how you have a small team and still get a ton done"

• Keep teams intentionally small but highly effective

  • "What you inherit from being in a research lab is that you take recruiting really seriously"
  • "We've always had this tendency to run relatively lean"
  • Takes inspiration from WhatsApp: "a very small team running a very global scope product"

• Build cross-functional capabilities within individuals

  • Value people who can think across boundaries
  • "Product is everyone's job"
  • Recruiting "doesn't stop when people are in the door, it actually starts" - team building continues

• Focus on team dynamics and trust

  • "Spend time team building and making sure that people have a huge amount of trust for each other's skill sets"
  • Create environments where people can "think across their boundaries"
  • Use whiteboarding sessions to break down silos and get into a "generative mindset"