Discussion on: Leadership And Company Hierarchy

HOFFMAN: I’m Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock, and your host. And I believe when you can’t find the right people to help your company scale, you have to make them. Being in a rapidly-scaling company can feel like being the lead in your own superhero saga. Each day pits you against new problems that feel like they need superhuman-levels of endurance to overcome.

And there will come a point in your adventure when being a lone crusader just won’t cut it. That’s when you need to enlist some help. But assembling a squad of fully-formed superheroes with the precise skill sets you need may prove tricky. The solution: think like Professor Xavier of the X-men: go forth and find young promising talent. Guide them in developing their powers and form them into a close-knit squad who’ll always have each other’s backs. If you do it right, you’ll create a formidable force. And their achievements will echo throughout your company and beyond.

This is one of the untold stories about many companies that have changed the world. These companies needed to hire for roles that had never existed before. They couldn’t always find the people they needed — so they made them instead. And these people, in turn, made the companies what they became. I wanted to talk to Marissa Mayer about this, because at Google she created one of the company’s least-known secret weapons: the program that hired and trained Google’s product managers. You may not have heard of the Associate Product Manager program, but it’s one of Google’s crown jewels, alongside Search and Gmail. And I would argue that it sits at the root of Google’s success.

Marissa herself is one of Silicon Valley’s more famous names. She joined Google as employee number 20 and their first female engineer. After 13 years at Google, she moved on to become Yahoo’s eighth – and final – CEO. Her time at Yahoo was controversial — and we’ll talk about that. But we’re going to start at the beginning. Marissa was still a college student and Google was one of a thousand teeny Silicon Valley startups competing for talent.

She helps to create the Associate Product Manager programme for Google.

Take some time to listen to the podcast it's really interesting and awesome on forming tight-knit teams to train anyone and bypass corporate bureaucracy for speeding up execution speed to get things done.