There’s a hiring pattern I see constantly in growing companies. They start feeling the strain. Things are falling through the cracks. Work is piling up. So they hire a coordinator, a project manager, or another team lead.

What they actually need is someone who can build things.

The Coordination Trap

Organisations have a tendency to respond to complexity by adding layers of management and coordination. It feels logical. More moving parts means more people to keep track of them, right?

But here’s what actually happens: you add a coordinator, and now the people doing the work have more meetings, more status updates, and more reporting requirements. Their productive time shrinks. So the workload pressure doesn’t decrease — it just shifts. The doers are doing less because they’re spending more time communicating about doing.

Cal Newport has written extensively about this phenomenon. He calls it the “hyperactive hive mind” — the idea that modern knowledge work has become primarily about communication rather than production. Adding coordinators reinforces that dynamic rather than breaking it.

What a Technical Hire Actually Changes

When I say “technical,” I don’t necessarily mean a software developer. I mean someone with the skills to directly produce output. That might be a developer, yes. But it could also be a data analyst who can build dashboards, a designer who can ship production-ready work, or an engineer who can configure and maintain systems.

The difference between a technical hire and a coordination hire is direct. A technical person reduces the backlog by doing the work. A coordinator redistributes the backlog across existing people.

Consider a simple example. Your marketing team is overwhelmed. They need campaign landing pages built, email automations configured, and analytics dashboards set up. You could hire a marketing manager to prioritise and project-manage this work — but who’s going to do it? The same overwhelmed team.

Or you could hire someone who knows HTML, can work in your marketing automation platform, and understands analytics. Suddenly, the bottleneck shrinks because there’s another pair of hands that can actually build.

The Australian Context

This is particularly relevant in Australia right now. The market for coordinators and project managers is saturated. There’s no shortage of people who can run meetings, create Gantt charts, and write status reports.

What’s scarce — and valuable — is people who can ship. Developers, data engineers, DevOps specialists, technical analysts. These are the roles that directly increase your organisation’s capacity to produce.

The Australian Computer Society reports persistent demand for technical roles across virtually every industry. And companies that can’t find local talent are increasingly looking at firms that provide fractional technical capability — like AI specialists in Brisbane and other cities — to fill the gap while they build internal capacity.

”But We Need Someone to Manage the Technical People”

This is the objection I hear most often. And sometimes it’s valid. If you have a team of six developers and no one leading them, yes, you need a technical lead.

But many organisations hire the manager before they hire the makers. They build the oversight structure before there’s anything to oversee. You end up with a manager managing one developer, which is an expensive way to get very little done.

The sequence matters. Build the capability first. Add the coordination layer when the team is large enough to genuinely need it. For most growing companies, that threshold is higher than they think.

How to Evaluate Technical Candidates (If You’re Not Technical)

This is where non-technical founders and managers often struggle. How do you interview someone for skills you don’t fully understand?

A few approaches that work:

• Give them a practical exercise. Not a whiteboard puzzle or a trick question. A real-world task that mirrors what they’d actually do in the role. Ask them to walk you through their approach and their reasoning.
• Check their work. Developers have GitHub profiles. Designers have portfolios. Data analysts can show you dashboards they’ve built. Look at what they’ve actually produced.
• Ask them to explain something complex simply. If a candidate can explain a technical concept in plain language, they probably understand it deeply. If they hide behind jargon, they might not.
• Get a technical person to co-interview. Even if you don’t have one on staff, bring in a contractor or advisor for the interview process. Their assessment of the candidate’s technical ability will be far more reliable than yours.

The Builder Mindset

Beyond specific skills, what you’re really looking for is someone with a builder mindset. Someone who sees a problem and thinks “I can fix that” rather than “let me schedule a meeting about that.”

Builders are impatient with bureaucracy, opinionated about tools, and motivated by visible progress. They’re not always the easiest people to manage. They might push back on processes they see as pointless. They’ll ask uncomfortable questions about why things are done a certain way.

That’s a feature, not a bug. These are the people who move organisations forward. They ship things. They reduce dependency on external vendors. They build internal capability that compounds over time.

The Bottom Line

If your team is overwhelmed, the instinct to hire a manager or coordinator is understandable. But pause and ask: is the bottleneck coordination, or capacity?

If it’s capacity — if the problem is that there aren’t enough people who can actually do the work — then your next hire should be someone who builds. Someone technical. Someone who ships.

You can always add management later. But you can’t manage your way out of a capability gap.