| name | hire-the-circle |
| description | Turn growth-team values into working artifacts — role scorecards, interview kits with listen-fors — and map which rings of the growth circle run on agents versus humans, with explicit approval boundaries. Use when hiring a first growth person, when staffing growth work across a human/agent team, when a growth hire is failing and nobody can say why, or when deciding what an autonomous agent may and may not do to users. |
| metadata | {"pack":"2026-07-growth-circle","forged-by":"claude-fable-5","forged-from":"session-2026-07-02-growth-circle — the Growth Circle protocol (github.com/zakelfassi/growth-circle)","forged-reason":"Culture beats capability every time, because what you value is what you achieve — and in 2026 'the team' includes agents, so the values need an execution boundary, not a poster.","usage-count":"0"} |
Hire the Circle
Values into scorecards, scorecards into interviews, and the circle's rings
staffed across humans and agents — with the two non-delegables in writing.
Gate
None — team design is legitimate at any stage. But the output lands in
GROWTH.md ## Team, so create the file from the template if absent.
Inputs
GROWTH.md (what work the rings currently demand), current team and
agent inventory, and the role being hired or the lane being delegated.
The traits (score evidence, not vibes)
- Horsepower — can actually do the analysis, not just commission it.
- Purpose over pressure — won't buckle into short-term optimization.
- Competitive, idea-brutal, person-respectful — attacks the claim,
never the colleague.
- Quality bar near perfectionism — a win of 10 basis points asks for 20.
- Courage to reset — can take something working and say "not here,
start again."
- Integrity under score pressure — reports the failed experiment plainly.
- Hires better than themselves — and isn't threatened when it works.
- Value over perception — builds the real thing rather than the
narrative of the thing. The trait the whole system stands on.
Steps
-
Write the scorecard. Per trait: what evidence looks like in this
candidate's history (a busted-belief story with the data; a metric they
retired; a hire who outgrew them). One trait = one story minimum.
-
Build the interview kit. Questions that elicit stories, with
listen-fors and red flags. Red flags worth naming: metric talk with no
user in the sentence; wins narrated without luck acknowledged; contempt
for "boring" experiments; K-factor enthusiasm before retention exists.
-
Map the rings. For each ring, assign: owner, operators, and
boundary. Agents excel at the monotony — instrumentation, lore queries,
loop bookkeeping, ledger hygiene, probe suites. Humans hold judgment
calls: keystone succession, context-reset verdicts, publication.
-
Write the two non-delegables. The alienation test and consent
decisions never go to agents, regardless of capability. Every
autonomous lane gets: a ledger it writes to, attribution on every entry,
and a named human veto. Ambiguity here is where spam machines are born.
-
Record. Scorecard, kit, and ring map to GROWTH.md ## Team, dated.
Revisit the map when the team or the model generation changes.
Conventions
- Culture-capability conflicts get flagged explicitly: a brilliant
candidate who optimizes perception fails the card, and the card wins.
- Score agents like hires: an agent lane earns autonomy by ledger history
(clean pre-registrations, honest kills), not by model name.
- The growth owner must be senior enough to engage core product strategy —
growth abstracted away from product value becomes channel management.
Edge Cases
- Solo founder, no hires planned. The ring map is still the deliverable:
founder + agents is a team, and the non-delegables still need writing down.
- A failing growth hire. Re-run the scorecard against observed behavior;
the gap names the problem (often trait 8, hired on trait 1).
- An agent lane wants more autonomy. Grant it ring by ring against its
ledger history; never grant the non-delegables, which is what "earned
autonomy" tempts you toward.
