Q:

I'm an engineer with no experience of managing people but will be in charge of hiring help soon. How can I prepare for it?

I am a mid-junior-ish engineer who joined the right startup at the right time as their first employee. I do various embedded software related things for the products we develop but as most of what we develop is currently contracted out I also help with quite a bit of soft-engineering and product strategy stuff. It's quite clear to me that I'm on a trajectory for some kind of technical product management / owner role, and I'm pretty content with that.
The most imminent part of that will involve our team expanding by a few people. My boss encouraged me to start thinking about what kind of folk I'll be looking to hire to help me with the technical development and scaling up of our system. I have no experience with managing people, not to mention hiring, but I want to make sure I do as good of a job at that as possible.
What can I do now to best prepare for this hiring process? What to keep in mind when leading a search for a technical person who is likely to be more technically experienced than me? Are there much quality resources I can find to prepare for managing our product once more people are on board? I appreciate those are pretty broad questions, but hopefully not too much so!

A:

Start with listing the company's needs in this field.
Analyse what is being outsourced and figure out what it would take to do it in-house. Then, with that as a base, work on the details. The hardest part is compiling the list thoroughly.
The rest you can pick up as you go, so long as you have a solid idea of what's needed going forwards.

