Hiring For The Big Picture

A conversation with Katapult's Integrator, Kevin Ogden.

When Kevin Ogden talks about hiring, his focus is on equipping his department heads and team leads to own the decision fully. Starting with the three-year plan, the P&L, and what the team needs.

Kevin is Katapult's Integrator. We run on EOS, and in EOS the usual CEO and COO responsibilities get split a different way: a Visionary who looks ahead and sets direction, and an Integrator who turns that direction into traction. Kevin owns our P&L, and the team leads for engineering services, software, marketing and sales, innovation, and internal operations all report to him. Every hire at Katapult lands somewhere in his line of sight.

"As Integrator, I bring our vision to traction. I'm responsible for our P&L and finances, and I oversee our leadership team."

We've written before about getting the right people in the right seats, and about growing experts instead of just looking to fill roles with external candidates. I sat down with Kevin to talk about the bigger picture: how hiring fits into the plan for the whole business, what we're willing to give up to protect our culture, and why the hardest seat to fill keeps turning out to be the one where someone leads and manages other people.

Every hire should have a trigger

Kevin wants the leaders of our profit centers (engineering services and software) to own their divisions the way a decision-maker owns a business. That means hiring starts inside each division's plan, and Kevin's job is to see how the plans connect and to "trust but verify."

"When our head of services comes up with his one-, two-, and three-year plan, it includes what our revenue is going to be, what projects we're going to land, and as part of that, what staff we're going to have to hire and what the trigger is for each hire."

So when a hire comes up, the first thing Kevin asks is whether it was on the plan.

"If it's unplanned, why weren't we able to plan for it? Sometimes it's a good thing, because we landed a project we didn't expect. Sometimes it's a bad thing, and we just did poor planning. But a lot of the time it's, 'Yeah, this is on plan. This was the trigger we predicted, that trigger happened, so now we're going to hire this position.'"

That habit matters because, as Kevin puts it, staff costs are our biggest expense. If you run operations at an engineering firm, a busy season can turn into a string of rushed hires pretty quickly. Writing down the trigger ahead of time gives you something to check the rush against, and an unplanned hire becomes a chance to learn what the plan missed.

We'll cap growth before we let it change who we are

We've written before about controlling your team's growth, and Kevin still watches it closely. He tracks how fast each team, each division, and the company as a whole is growing, because a fast jump in headcount changes a team even when every new hire is a good one.

"There are guardrails we put up, because regardless of how good the employees are, a huge increase in one pocket of a team or division can't help but change the culture. That's a flag we throw up."

We asked him directly whether Katapult would turn down a project if taking it meant unhealthy staffing. He didn't pretend it was simple. Sometimes a project matters for a financial target, and saying no has its own cultural costs. But a yes is never automatic.

"Our default isn't, 'We landed the project, or we have an opportunity to do this project, so we'll close our eyes and be blind to the cultural impacts.' No. The health of the organization is the most important thing."

Before anyone says no, the team goes looking for another way to do the work:

"Where's our innovation? Where can we do more with the same? Who's looking to level up? Who's been asking for more? What's in our pipeline? There's tons of things we're looking for."

Those options don't always close the gap, and Kevin is clear about what happens when they don't: "We would consider saying no to a project more often than the average company, just to stay true to our culture, because we think that is the win long term."

If you're growing a firm of your own, it's worth deciding where your guardrails sit before the big job shows up, while it's still an easy conversation.

Culture fit wins the tiebreaker, and role fit is right behind it

Kevin wants both every time. When we pushed him to pick one, he didn't hesitate.

"If I had to choose, it's culture every day. Great culture fit. We are relentless in screening, growing, hiring, and firing based on our core values and our culture. So that's number one. And right after that, very close, we care deeply about role fit."

That lines up with how we've always talked about core values here. They're the things you hire, fire, reward, and promote on, and they apply to the field technician the same way they apply to the leadership team. It's tempting to relax the bar for a hard-to-fill seat, but holding everyone to the same standard is what lets a culture last past its first few hires.

Good workflows should make people better at the work

A lot of what we build in Katapult Pro is meant to make hard work more accessible. Our photo-based field workflow exists because we needed a young team to capture high-quality data safely without months or years of experience first. So we asked Kevin whether a good workflow can make up for a lack of experience.

"It's a slippery slope. In the short term, yes, absolutely. But we want our workflow and our technology to constantly be making our staff better, so they add more value and continue to grow. We want it to be a virtuous cycle."

The test he uses is a good one for any operations leader: if the technology disappeared tomorrow, could your team still do the work?

"If you were to rip the technology away, that would stink, and of course we would all become slower. But we would still have the power to do the work, because we're able to do it. That's super important for us as a company."

That's why we built feedback and review tools into the software, and why our fielders spend a day a week in the office doing their own pre-design. The goal is to keep people in the driver's seat, with the workflow teaching them what they're doing and why. Kevin's version: "It's not accessible workflows and no upskilling of the employee. It's both, hand in hand."

There's no silver-bullet resume

Katapult has had a lot of success hiring people from other careers. We've got teammates who studied art, biology, and history, and our field team has had good luck hiring landscapers and people from construction. Kevin's warning is about what happens on the other end of that, when a company writes the perfect job description and waits for the perfect candidate.

"I think a pitfall is when you create a perfect position, have a perfect resume in mind, and you think you can find that silver bullet. It's not that that hasn't worked or can't work. But as a company, we keep doubling down on the idea that the best way to fill positions is to have a really good internal pipeline and commit to developing your current staff."

Even a strong outside hire needs real time to learn how a company works. Kevin knows that firsthand. He came to Katapult from outside, and the onboarding he went through says a lot about what we're willing to invest.

"I had a really intensive six-month training program where our former Integrator was extremely focused on working with me and investing across the business to make sure I was ready to be the Integrator. If you add up all those hours, that's a huge investment that he and the team made in me."

After the training came another six to 12 months of doing the work, failing forward, and learning, before Kevin felt up to speed and able to understand the organization and where we are going well enough to get that vision into traction. If it takes that long for the right person in a senior seat, it's worth asking how long your own plan gives a new hire before you expect them to carry the load.

Everyone bottlenecks on leaders

We asked Kevin what advice he'd give other operations leadersin our industry. He said he'd be slow to give advice, but quick to jump into the conversation, because the conversation almost always lands in the same place.

"I love talking with other people about how their companies are growing, and almost everyone bottlenecks on the same thing. It's people, and specifically people who can lead, whether that's a project manager or a team lead."

New tools haven't made that easier. Kevin was careful to say that this isn't a story about needing fewer people to do the work.

"We want a person to stay in charge, and I see the same value in the people doing the work. We don't want to replace them either. But as LLMs and other technology let us do more and more, we keep bottlenecking on people who can manage projects and people really well. That only gets harder as we can do more."

The fix that's worked best for us is giving current staff a chance to step up before they have the title. It's hard to be confident in a leadership hire from an interview, because the thing you most need to know is how someone handles being wrong in front of other people.

"How do they respond when their decision is wrong and they've failed publicly? If someone's never done that, you don't know how they'll handle it the first time it happens as a project manager or people manager."

So when someone wants to try, we pair them with one of our seasoned project managers, in training or on a smaller project, knowing they'll make mistakes along the way and that it'll cost the senior PM real time to pour into them.

"That's the short-term loss and long-term win of training up the next round of leaders and managers. Is it worth it? 100%."