Case Study: Scaling a team at Busuu
Kirtsten Campbell-Howes on what she learned about building a team at Busuu and how she’s applying it at her new startup, Visibly.
“You've got to be very careful with hiring when you're an early stage startup,” says Kirsten Campbell-Howes, former Chief Learning Officer at Busuu, now CLO at Visibly.
“Every person that you bring into the team - if you hire them right - becomes a force multiplier. They create far more value on their own than potentially would happen in a bigger company where their impact is more diffuse.”
She pauses. “But if you get that hire wrong, they can become the opposite of that. They drain resources away from you and other people without adding value. Because they don't get the context. Or they need a lot of support. Or they're not confident enough to go off and take ownership of something and make it work themselves,” she reflects.
“I always caution startups to hire slowly and carefully. It's better to leave a role unfilled than rush to fill it when you're at an early stage, which can be a bit counterintuitive.”
Kirsten is reflecting on her experience of building a learning team at the successful social language learning app Busuu and what she is taking forward into her new role at Visibly, a startup who are filling the skills gap in the infrastructure sector.
She sees the challenge of building a startup team in two phases: pre and post product-market fit. The first requires people who can find a product that people want and are willing to pay for. The second is a team who can build on these insights and grow it.
The Busuu growth challenge
Kirsten joined Busuu in 2015, when after 7-years, founders Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti had found a nascent product-market fit with their consumer business. The team was around 20 people: a third of them in product and tech, a couple in marketing, a couple in learning and a few execs and ops folks.
“There was a strong product-market fit for the product itself, growth and traction. But the learning aspect was kind of unformed. I was brought into the business because I had specific learning expertise around linguistics and instructional design,” says Kirsten.
“There'd been a focus on building product features, gamification, user generated content and so on, which was working really well. But users were being let down by the quality of the learning,” she remembers.
Her objective was to recruit and train up a team who had a proper teaching background as well as good product instincts, who could help create retention.
“So that it wasn't just some fun features and the opportunity to connect with native speakers, but there was also a solid, scaffolded learning journey that could take you from A to B and get you close to fluency in a language,” she says.
Busuu had recently taken on new investment from McGraw Hill and there was also an appetite to build on Busuu’s early experiments with machine learning plus, explore a new business-to-business offering.
By the time she left nearly 8-years later, Busuu had grown into a hybrid team of around 200 people split across offices in Madrid and London. In 2022, they successfully sold to global education giant Chegg, after building a business-to-business product that had scaled across multiple markets and sectors and complemented their core consumer business, which had provided the initial engine of growth.
Her challenge at Visibly is different. The company is just turning 2-years old, the team is around 15, about half in engineering. They have a strong product vision, initial traction and have raised $7.5m in Seed funding. But are not yet at the scale up moment.
Qualities for the early stages
She reckons the key attributes for hires early on are creativity, flexibility and the ability to make decisions.
“Prevarication is a real killer,” she says. “It wastes time, it wastes money, and it doesn't get you anywhere. Sometimes you're going to make a decision and it's wrong. But it's better to make that decision and learn than to prevaricate and not learn anything.”
Along with these attributes, you need someone who can cope with the ambiguous nature of startup life.
“For me, that's always meant people with a sense of humour,” she says. “Startup life is tough and it's stressful. If you can't cope with that, with good humour, you're going to struggle.” She notes that other startups might instead look for killer instincts and a straight and narrow approach to business. “But for me, I find that having a sense of humour and the ability to let a certain amount of stress roll off your shoulders is a very powerful characteristic for an early stage hire.”
Starting to build an aligned team
Kirsten joined Busuu when there was already an established squad structure, working to an agile methodology with Product Managers leading on web and mobile.
“I very quickly understood that this was working well for the business,” remembers Kirsten. “So as I began to recruit learning designers into the team we began to work in an agile way too. We were on the same cycle as the engineering team.”
To begin with, they didn't have a concept of embedding learning designers into product squads. That came later.
“Because we were such a small team and we were co-located in the same office that happened naturally,” says Kirsten.
“The engineers would be working on a feature. They would call a learning designer into a meeting and we would thrash out different ideas together because they wanted to understand, ‘are we building this in the right way to help people learn a language?’ And so that cross-functional work just happened naturally as a result of hiring good, curious, intelligent people and having them in the same place.”
Scaling up: from flexible to stable
She says that post initial product-market fit, assuming you have investors or you're profitable, there will be pressure to grow. Growth becomes the objective and this changes things.
“The word scale should start to feature in every conversation you're having,” says Kirsten. “Everything that you're building from your learning, your research, your product, your process, needs to support that scale.”
She considers the right word to describe the key qualities for people in the scaling stage. “Stable is one that comes to mind,” she says thoughtfully.
“The mistake I probably made was filling the team with very creative but quite scattered people who loved working on multiple things simultaneously. And not balancing that energy with more stable qualities,” she reflects.
“The people who are there early are very adventurous and ambitious. They like change. They thrive in chaos. But they're not necessarily the people who will sit down and start creating a lot of content at speed with an eye to quality and detail,” she says. “And those are the people that you need when you start to scale. You need people who are stable and focused. They can still be ambitious and creative. But they need to be able to sit down and create a schedule and deliver on some often quite challenging objectives.”
She says that this can be a painful moment to navigate. “It wasn't like everything changed overnight, it changed over time. But we got to a bit of a breaking point with the team.”
This is about recognising the new needs of the business. “I had to make some very difficult decisions at around this point,” she says ruefully. “I let go of quite a few of the freelancers we'd worked with, who were exceptional people. All of them have gone on to do great things in other businesses. But they weren't the right fit for what we needed at that point, which was a very strong focus on creating a lot of content.”
However, at the same time, there were early hires that were ready for new opportunities in the business. She says you should look out for these.
“Sometimes you have some truly exceptional people. They've grown with you and want to be managers. They'll start to want to be leaders,” she smiles. “One of the people who was there prior to me joining Busuu as a freelancer is now one of the leaders of the team. Those people can and absolutely should come with you on the journey.”
Beyond Dunbar’s number
She also believes that going beyond 150 - the number the anthropologist Robin Dunbar has also identified as humans' natural social group - has a dramatic impact for some and this is where you might lose a lot of the original team.
“Some people just do not thrive in large organisations even though they seem to be able to navigate small and medium sized environments without any difficulties,” she observes. “I, for example, certainly don't thrive in 200 plus person environments. That's something I've realised about myself and have adjusted my career accordingly.”
Codifying your principles
She says that at the point you begin to scale up, it becomes important to start to make explicit the implicit things that have got you where you are.
“You need to take the learnings from getting to product-market fit and then codify them. That's quite important,” she says. “That needs to go into the onboarding process, training materials and into your culture. Every new hire should be building growth, rather than detracting from it. So you need to transmit that crucial information.”
White papers
An example was when she documented their approach to learning design by writing a White Paper called ‘The Busuu Methodology’.
“I was a bit resistant to do this because it felt a bit pompous,” she grimaces. “But as soon as I did it, I regretted not doing it earlier, because it turned out that what I thought was quite obvious about our methodology was not obvious to other people.”
It also had value outside of her immediate team. “Once I'd written it down in a format that everyone across the business could digest, many people came up to me and said, ‘Wow, I can see now why it's different to our competitors and why it brings value. You've given me so many talking points to have with customers. I feel proud of the work that I do!’”
She reflects that her hesitancy is a mistake that many leaders make.
“We talk about our strategy and our vision in a lot of meetings. We think that permeates down into the business and for some people it does. But for many people, a lot of the nuance gets lost in translation,” she suggests. “Having a good old-fashioned paper to read and come back to and refer to when you forget things, really helps transmit important stuff across the business. You need written information as well.”
These principles were also turned into a training course to enable new members of her team to quickly put them into practice on their content management system.
Behaviours
Another of the most powerful things they did at this stage was to work with a consultant who helped them to translate their company values into actionable behaviours.
“That was an extremely powerful step and helped us a lot in our hiring and identifying the kind of people we needed,” she remembers. “We could point to specific behaviours and say, well, this person embodies those behaviours, whereas this person does not.”
She says that for values to be useful you need these actionable behaviours, because it helps people understand what they mean in practice. I ask for an example.
“One of our values at Busuu was Happiness. The actionable behaviour we chose was celebrating the team,” she says. “And it was very clear that some people were very good at this and would constantly be elevating their other colleagues and doing small things to make the working environment better, whereas other people were very resistant to that.”
They identified 15 behaviours, three for each value. “They gave us really concrete things to make much better hiring and culture based decisions around,” she says.
When to do this
She says there is a balance about when it is worth spending time on documenting. They’re not yet ready at Visibly, for example.
“In the early days of Busuu, creating stable approaches would have just created a mess, getting in the way of getting to product-market fit,” she says. “But after we got there, it became really crucial to keep people engaged, informed, and onboard new people quickly into what needed to be done.”
Hiring well
For the last part of our conversation, we talk about how to hire well in this context.
“Take your time over it,” she says, without hesitation. “I still find myself making some of the same mistakes, in particular, rushing to hire because of the Fear Of Missing Out. Rushing to hire is always a mistake. You end up with people who slow you down, unless you're very lucky.”
She says that it can be beneficial to work with freelancers first.
“If you're not sure what the role needs, iron that out with people who you can learn from, who are fine with that because they're working in a contracting situation, and they understand the limits of that relationship,” she recommends. “Then create your job descriptions as you learn.”
She also cautions against hiring alone: “Make sure you're getting a second or ideally a third opinion from informed people.”
Another mistake she sees early stage startups making is hiring ad-hoc.
“There should be an overall hiring plan for the business,” she says. “If someone in your engineering team finds the most amazing head of engineering but their salary is so high that you can't then hire anyone else in any of the other teams, that's a problem. So your hiring needs to be joined up, and your leadership team should be discussing hiring across all departments openly on a weekly basis.”
She also says that it is vital to make sure that you test every candidate by providing them with a task that is a realistic example of what you expect them to do.
“So many times I've seen candidates who are strong at the interview, but crumble almost immediately when they actually get on the job, because they can't actually do the tasks. I don't think you can skip that test. And that's the case from the most junior hire to the most senior.”
So what does that look like in practice?
“A Google document with a set of practical challenges,” she suggests, stressing that it is not a way of getting free work done. “It is a way of showing the candidate the kind of tasks they would be doing when they work for you. It's a learning experience for them that helps them make a decision. It shouldn't be too long. It shouldn't be onerous. It shouldn't take a long time to judge.”
Her final piece of advice is that once you hire, you make sure that you provide regular constructive feedback to your new hires.
“You need to be prepared to give people in your team very direct constructive feedback from day one,” she says. “A lot of managers are reluctant to do this. But most people respond extremely well to constructive feedback, and this is what enables them to become the right person for your team. If you never give them the feedback, you might end up letting someone go who could actually have been quite strong.”
Summary
We finish by reflecting on the key points from the conversation:
Creativity, flexibility and the ability to make decisions are qualities you should look for early on, along with a sense of humour.
People who can provide stability and structure are necessary as you grow to provide balance and help you deliver on objectives.
Recognise when the needs of the business change. Which people can grow with you and who are better suited to smaller organisations? Don’t avoid making tough decisions.
Align teams’ ways of working and cadence to facilitate collaboration between teams.
Codify your principles by articulating behaviours and writing down what is unique about your approach. For example, a white paper on your learning method.
Take your time over hiring. Use freelancers first to understand what you need. Don’t fall into the FOMO trap.
Include a task when hiring. Make sure you test people on the realities of the job before they start. And then provide lots of feedback once they join.
I ask for her final advice. “You are going to get your hiring wrong,” she says. “You will make mistakes in hiring, and you will have to let people go. That doesn't mean that you have to be hasty or unpleasant in the way that you do that. But you cannot know in advance everything about hiring. You cannot hire the perfect people all the time. You will have to let people go, and you need to make peace with that.”
This case study features in my programme on Building Mission-Led Teams. The next cohort begins 7 October.