Competency Layers

You wrote your MOC. You listed the competencies. But here's what probably happened: you listed the role-specific skills and stopped. See: The MOC The framework for defining a role before you hire. This card zooms in on the "C."That's the layer every founder thinks about naturally. There are two more. If you haven't written them down, your interviewers are each guessing at a different standard. They're guessing differently.

Layer 1: The role

What does this particular job require? A head of sales needs different skills than a head of engineering. These competencies flow directly from the outcomes in your MOC. This is the layer you already know.

Layer 2: The level

What does the seniority of this role demand? A VP of Engineering and a VP of Sales have completely different role-specific competencies, but they share a set of level-specific ones: strategic thinking, cross-functional influence, ability to attract talent. A manager needs to give feedback, run 1:1s, develop people. An IC doesn't. This layer doesn't care what department someone's in.

The problem is that, early on, most founders either don't know or have never defined what each level actually requires. Dave Kellogg¹ has the best framework for this: ¹ Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP The single best article on understanding managerial levels.

• Managers are paid to drive results with some support.
• Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision.
• VPs are paid to make the plan.

Most founders get this wrong in a specific way. They hire someone at a director level but give them a VP title. Six months later, they're frustrated. They can't seem to make a plan, let alone deliver on one. You weren't filtering for that ability because you hadn't defined what the level required.

How much definition you need depends on your stage:

• 1–20 people: Know the difference between manager, director, and VP at a high level. You don't need twelve tiers.
• 20–50 people: Start writing it down. You're hiring enough people at overlapping levels that the informal version in your head won't hold. You don't need a full leveling system, but you need enough shared language that two interviewers evaluating a director candidate agree on what "director" means.
• 50–100 people: You need real specificity. A lot of people sit at each level and you want consistency about what it means.
• The trap in both directions: Too much definition too early is bureaucracy. Too little at any stage means titles are decorative.

Layer 3: The company

What must-haves apply to every single person you hire? These are the competencies that make your company your company. They go into every interview loop alongside the role-specific MOC.

Most companies either don't have these written down or have a version in a Google Doc that nobody references. Defining company-wide competencies, figuring out what values actually mean in practice, operationalizing them into interview questions — that's its own discipline. See: Values How to define, operationalize, and actually use company-wide competencies. This card names the layer; that card builds it.

What skipping this costs you

If you only interview for role-specific competencies, you'll recognize the symptoms:

• People who can do the work but have attitude problems
• People who are hard to motivate or do inconsistent work
• People at the wrong level, executing fine but not leading
• A persistent feeling of "they looked good on paper, why isn't this working?"

The deeper cost is a vicious cycle. A mediocre hiring process attracts people who are comfortable with mediocre. Those people don't want to put in the work of defining competency layers. You hire more mediocre people. A rigorous process does the opposite. Great people are impressed by discipline, and they attract more great people. The cycle reinforces itself in whichever direction you let it go.

This is a closed-loop system

Do the upfront work to define what goes in each layer. But know that there's only so much you can figure out before going out and trying it. You have a hypothesis of what competencies you need. You do calibration calls to sharpen it. You hire someone. You learn what works and what doesn't. You update the MOC and do it better next time.

Some of this you'll discover the hard way. You hire someone who's missing a competency you didn't know you cared about, and suddenly it's obvious. Then you make it explicit and build it into every loop going forward. All three layers get refined through use. That's the point. This isn't a one-time exercise you get right in a conference room. It's a system that gets sharper every time you run it.