I’m a huge crossword puzzle aficionada.  On a typical week, I do the Saturday puzzle in the New York Times, the puzzles on Brendan Emmett Quigley’s site, the AVCX puzzle (which has recently expanded), the Inkubator puzzle, and the Hub crosswords.)

We’ll get into my sudoku, Wordle, and Spelling Bee obsessions some other day.

On New Year’s Day, 31A was clued as, “Start of many a Google search.” 

I penciled in “HOW.”

Nope, a few minutes later (OK, like thirty frustrating minutes later I realized that wouldn’t work – it needed to start with a “W”. 

“WHY,” I wrote, after erasing “HOW.”

I thought about how funny it was that my gut reaction was “HOW.”  I use Google to figure out how to do things: how to fix a dishwasher, how to choose a rug, how to sell a car, how to start a campfire.  But apparently, lots of other people use Google for WHY things are; autofill showed me ‘why is the sky blue’, ‘why is russia invading ukraine’, ‘why is my eye twitching’.   

Which, like my recent observations about bakers and chefs, made me think about the composition of a good team. Teams need some people who think about “WHY” we’re seeing a certain outcome, and then you need other people who want to focus on “HOW” to execute. It’s rare that the same individual is really good at both of those things, but I’ve never seen a great team that doesn’t have a mix of both kinds of people 

“Ask good questions” is my dad’s most durable piece of advice. And you need people who can ask different kinds of questions. WHY is this campaign underperforming? WHY is the conversion rate increasing? WHY don’t we sell more services. And also HOW do we get stakeholder alignment?  HOW do we run an experiment on home page messaging?  HOW do we get more feedback from customers?

Recruiting and hiring is a skill, and it’s hard, and it’s rewarding as all get out.  But building a team – it’s taking hiring and adding massive amounts of context to the process to take the existing team into account.  No small feat.

PS: I’d be lying if said that the crossword story ended there.  “WHO” ended up being the actual answer to 31A.

I like cooking, and most weeks I try to cook dinner a few times.  The more strategic my job has gotten, the more comparative satisfaction I get at the end of a workday from being in the kitchen and creating something that has a quick payoff. 

I tolerate baking. Every once in a while I’ll make banana bread, muffins, Nigella’s granola bars, or Mark Bittman’s onion pan bread.  But baking makes me nervous. You follow the directions, then you give up control – you have to trust that it is going to bake as planned, and you don’t have many ways to alter things once it starts baking.

Not so with cooking. With cooking, you can baste, salt, cover, uncover, add liquid, stir, skim fat, thicken with cornstarch, separate into a 2nd pan, dish, or bowl, and make numerous other adjustments.  Much lower-risk, much more control, and, for me, a much better track record in coming out good.

When I was in college, I noticed that people wrote papers in one of these two ways – some wrote papers all the way through, then went back to adjust what was necessary.  Others couldn’t let a single word be wrong as they went, so when they finished once through, the paper was done.  I was the former.

And at work I see a similar bifurcation. Some people like to tinker constantly with projects (the chefs), while others “set it and forget it.”  Take the example of a Google Ads implementation.  Chefs tinker with keywords daily, and get more feedback sooner.  Bakers let experiments run for longer and see more extensive results that are probably sturdier. Chefs are more agile, and bakers more strategic.

Gourmet restaurants have both, and increasingly I’m thinking good marketing teams do too.  Too many chefs, and you can miss the big picture.  Too many bakers, and you aren’t reacting quickly enough.

There are certain characteristics I look for in every candidate I interview: curiosity, passion, and coachability, to name a few.  And as my team has gotten bigger, I’ve also looked for particular skillsets that would complement those that my team members have.  For example, in the past few years I’ve actively sought out people who had a good grasp of core marketing tactics, and people who were good at execution, when I thought my team was short on those capabilities.

This baker/chef characteristic seems like a good thing to keep an eye on if I’m going to have a James Beard Award-winning marketing team.