First-hire role definition matrix

Most early hires fail not because the candidate was wrong but because the role was undefined. The founder felt overstretched, wrote a job description borrowed from a friend, hired the most impressive applicant, and then discovered eight weeks in that the gap and the hire did not match. The candidate is not at fault. The matrix below would have caught this in the half-hour before the JD was written.

Fill it out for every one of your first one to three hires. Then write the JD from the matrix.

The seven rows

1. The gap

Name the work currently not getting done, or being done badly because it sits on the wrong person. Quantify if you can: hours per week being lost, decisions being deferred, customers being let down. The hire fills the gap; the gap is not the role title.

2. Success in 90 days

Three concrete things this person will have shipped, owned, or visibly changed by the end of the third month. Use 'shipped', 'closed', 'reduced', 'documented' verbs. Avoid 'understand', 'be familiar with', 'support'.

3. Success in 12 months

One sentence. The thing this person will have made true that was not true before. This is the hire-vs-no-hire frame the board should be able to see twelve months later.

4. Decisions they will own

Three to five concrete decisions that, the day after they start, will be theirs and not the founders. Be specific: the pricing of the standard tier, the onboarding email sequence, the technical stack for the next service. Founder loneliness comes from carrying decisions that should have been delegated; the matrix forces the delegation in advance.

5. Decisions they will not own

Two or three decisions that stay with the founder. The fundraising strategy. The first ten customers. The brand voice. Naming this is as important as naming what they own. Without it, the hire either over-reaches or under-acts, and either failure mode is hard to debug after the fact.

6. The release condition

What would make us part ways inside the first six months, and what would we do about it. Most founders skip this row because it feels uncharitable. It is the most important row in the matrix. A hire who knows the conditions feels safer because the rules are visible; a hire who does not know them is fired by surprise. (And the founder, having no condition pre-written, defers the call too long.)

7. The compensation envelope

Cash and equity, named in ranges before any candidate is named. Decide it on the gap, not on what the candidate asks for. Two ranges per row: cash band and equity band. Decide them now, write them down, share them with the team. The discipline is what stops the equity table getting reorganised one bad week at a time.

Sequence

Fill the matrix → write the JD from it → screen against the matrix, not the JD.

The JD is a marketing artefact. The matrix is the actual hiring brief. When the candidate's experience is inverted relative to one column, the conversation in the second interview is about that column, concretely, with examples. The matrix turns vague enthusiasm into a structured judgement.

On the day they start

• Hand them the matrix. Yes, all of it. The release-condition row included.
• Walk through each row with them in their first half-day. Get explicit agreement on the success criteria.
• Schedule the 90-day review on day one. Diary it now, while the calendar is empty.

The first hire is not the moment you stop being lonely. It is the moment you discover whether you knew what was missing, and whether you had the discipline to write it down before the conversation got hopeful.

Template from Marga Haus · margahaus.com/resources · Adapt and use freely. Attribution appreciated, not required.