Excellent read, but unfortunately a little lacking in terms of solutions.
I've found myself in this position a few times, and in general, it was more likely to happen in Sales-focused organizations where non-technical sales people were all too eager to make unsustainable promises to land big customers for lots of cash.
Often the customers' real business problems could have been handled more elegantly with minimal code churn and a more sustainable pace for the dev team. But without a solid Product Manager to guide them to the right solution, an incoming request from sales was more likely to just be reformatted and then turned into a user story and/or bug.
I always felt the only sensible solution was to re-align the business expectations and help the product find it's focus, but frankly I was never successful at pulling this off.
As brador observes, the problem isn't the hiring, it's that the hiring came too late. The solution is that you have to suck it up and hire Alice anyhow, and probably one or two others. Yes, in the short term they'll make things worse, but in the long term you'll be able to recover. The alternative is that in the short term things stay bad and in the long term things get worse.
I've found myself in this position a few times, and in general, it was more likely to happen in Sales-focused organizations where non-technical sales people were all too eager to make unsustainable promises to land big customers for lots of cash.
Often the customers' real business problems could have been handled more elegantly with minimal code churn and a more sustainable pace for the dev team. But without a solid Product Manager to guide them to the right solution, an incoming request from sales was more likely to just be reformatted and then turned into a user story and/or bug.
I always felt the only sensible solution was to re-align the business expectations and help the product find it's focus, but frankly I was never successful at pulling this off.