“Ask them directly what they'd do with code.”
“Ask them directly what their role looks like day‑to‑day with a four‑person team: how much time they spend coding, whether they're hands‑on with the architecture, and how much of their week goes to the pure management stuff.”
“The grounding shows your candidate's trajectory matter less than what they actually want to do.”
“I've seen candidates who code beautifully solo but don't enjoy the back-and-forth of shaping something with others.”
“Ask them to write code with you for an hour. That's the real interview, and it tells you everything you need to know about whether they'll want to ship with a small team. I did that hire at Chartboost, and after seeing someone debug a problem in real time next to you, or watch how they name variables and organize a function, you know if they'll thrive in that size or stay hungry to go somewhere bigger.”
“Ask them directly what drew them to the role and whether they've mentored before. The gap between impressive engineer and right lead is whether they see people development as the real work now, not an extra thing they squeeze in around coding.”
“I led a team of four at SquadStack and you can't judge it from an interview—I'd have asked myself questions about whether someone really wants to stay hands-on, because the pressure to stop coding is real and some people give it up without noticing. The work I'm most proud of there was shipping Auctm in 2.5 months, but that mattered because I was designing and coding alongside the team the whole time, not hovering.”