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.