I am on the product design team at Fullscreen, which is one-third of the greater Product, Design, and Engineering (PDE) organization. We have many talented and intelligent people on our team, and we’re growing fast.

The risk of any organization growing fast is that it grows incorrectly. This can mean failing to welcome and culturally assimilate new hires, which can degrade company culture. It can also mean hiring the wrong balance of people. In nature, good growth is called adolescence; bad growth is called cancer.

Our design team needs to grow to keep up with the blistering pace of development at Fullscreen. So HR tasked us with writing job descriptions and formally posting job listings for newbies on our team.

We sat down together with the prompt: what skills are you looking to add to your team? This initiated a line of dialogue that is so simple and obvious, I’m embarrassed to admit that, up until that moment, I had never had a conversation like it at this company or any other in my career. The conversation: what are our skills, how experienced are we at them, where are we strong and where are we weak as a team?

I have a hypothesis about why we’d never explicitly had this conversation: this is the realm of managers, and managers usually go by their gut. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of the team (theoretically), and they know the ideal, future makeup of the team they’re trying to build (ideally).

Guts don’t scale. And they sure as hell don’t work in your absence.

Going with your gut is great. It seems to be a sophisticated, sub- or super-conscious way of processing lots of information quickly. In the mind of someone with the right experience and intelligence, it can work wonders. But here we get to the real purpose of this post, and something that, if you’re a manager of a creative team, should keep you up at night. Guts don’t scale. And they sure as hell don’t work in your absence.

So here’s our team (Justin, Stephen, Sean, and me), having this explicit conversation about what our strengths and weaknesses are as a team, and the GUT PROBLEM comes up. What does any good product design team do: we took to the whiteboard.

After many abandoned doodles, we had our first draft of a tool to visualize the skill-makeup of creative teams — to try to attribute rules and imagery to the GUT PROBLEM.