The MOC

¹ From Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. How Andy teaches it, extended to cover the MOC's full lifecycle beyond hiring.

Before you talk to a single candidate, write the MOC. Most founders skip straight to posting a job description. That's backwards. The job description is the external marketing document. The MOC is the internal truth document, and it's where the real work happens. If you can't define the role clearly enough to write a MOC, you're not ready to hire.

What Skipping the MOC Will Cost You

People hire someone, discover the person is missing key competencies, fire them, and then conclude they should have gotten clear on what they wanted before they started.

Think about what that actually costs. Say you're paying someone $250K and they stay for four years. That's a million-dollar decision. Now add the time your team spent interviewing, onboarding, and ramping this person. Add the opportunity cost of not having the right person in the seat. Add the real damage a bad hire can do through poor decisions. Now think about how much work you'd put into buying a million-dollar house: researching neighborhoods, bringing in a home inspector, checking the school districts. You need to put at least that much work into every senior hire. The MOC is how you do it.

Start with Calibration

See: The Calibration Call for how to learn what great looks like for a role before you write the MOC. Talk to 1–2 people who've done the job well.

Before you write anything, talk to one or two people who've held this role at companies you admire. The goal isn't to copy their job. It's to learn what great looks like at your stage so you can write a sharper MOC.

The Three Components

1. Mission. Why does this role exist? What is its core purpose? This should be two to four sentences. If you can't write it clearly, you don't understand the role yet.
2. Outcomes. What does this person need to accomplish in the first 12–18 months? Not activities ("manage the sales team"), but results ("grow ARR from $2M to $8M"). Rank them by importance. Three to eight outcomes is the sweet spot.
3. Competencies. What skills and abilities does someone need to deliver those outcomes? See: Competency Layers Three layers of competency go into every hire: role-specific, level-specific, and company-wide. Most founders only articulate the first.Think in three layers: role-specific competencies (unique to this job), level-specific competencies (if hiring a leader: ability to attract talent, strategic thinking, influence), and company-wide competencies (your values, the things every hire should share).

The Fourth Dimension: Commitment

Beyond mission, outcomes, and competencies, find out whether the candidate is genuinely excited about three things: your company's mission, working with their specific manager, and doing this particular role (not what it might turn into). Commitment is a subjective call, but naming it out loud forces the conversation.

The MOC Doesn't End at Hiring

It becomes four things:

1. The interview guide. Design every interview question to test a specific outcome or competency from the MOC. Train your interview team so everyone evaluates against the same document: not just what you're looking for, but how you're going to determine whether you've found it.
2. The onboarding document. Share the MOC with your new hire on day one. "These are your goals, these are the competencies I'm evaluating you on." Get their explicit agreement.
3. The evaluation framework. Use it at 30/60/90 days. For each outcome and competency, ask: does this person have a 90% or better chance of delivering? If the answer is no, you need to act. Not wait a year hoping things improve.
4. The firing criteria. If someone isn't meeting the MOC at 30/60/90, you have clear, documented grounds. The MOC removes the ambiguity from one of the hardest decisions founders face.

The MOC is a management document that starts at hiring. One page that tells you who to look for, how to interview them, what to expect in their first year, and when to make the hard call if it's not working. The founders who put the work in up front don't just hire better. They onboard faster, evaluate more clearly, and make firing decisions without second-guessing themselves for six months. The ones who skip it spend a year learning what a weekend of focused thinking would have told them.