What an startup entrepreneur should never miss while building a team?

Now a days all entrepreneurs are busy to build a great team, they look for a young passionate crew who not only has team leading quality but also can burn his/her energy to make the startup successful. But most of these young passionate crew lack one thing i.e. what is and how to follow a proper process? If not implemented in individual it slows down the growth of the company while their competitors do well.

I am wrapping it up for both entrepreneurs as well as employee. An entrepreneur should ask and an employee should be aware of the questions like;

What kind of process improvement have you done in your working tenure?

Possible Intention:

• To know if you understand in real sense, what process improvement is.
• To know if you have applied the theory, you learned, in practice.
• To know if you have a 'big picture' understanding from process point of view.

Insights:

• Read more to develop a sense of 'big picture' understanding on process improvement.
• Think of this process improvement more from your productivity perspective. 
• It may be very small improvement but it tells a lot about your project understanding and approach.

Example Answer:

In our project, we used to perform ad-hoc unit testing and completely missed testing of some peculiar cases like null, empty string for some methods. And this used to be discovered in integration testing of the system. When team lead found this, we did root cause analysis and decided to write unit test cases using framework like JUnit. We formed a small team of two members for proof of concept. Once it was successful, we used tools like eclipse to generate unit test cases. Later on it was adopted as best practice for the project in java. 

Anti pattern:

• Do not tell about some improvement which you have not been part of.
• first you need to be absolutely clear about the basic process followed and only then you can suggest something. The suggestion may not be very technology intensive etc., however it should have perceivable benefit which you can substantiate.

Interviewer's Interpretation:

• You have process understanding and orientation, plus experience of working on process driven culture.

Tell me 4-5 important things which you will carry if you have to stay below sea for a month.

Possible Intention:

• To know how creative you are.
• To know if you get baffled by a bouncer question.

Insights:

• Stay calm and use you creativity.
• Give a disclaimer that you are not expert or have any experience of staying below sea, so you are guessing.
• What is expected is, some logical guess work and not the right answer.

Example Answer:

Before giving the answer I would have really searched on Google for the kind of environment and gears required to stay below the sea.

Now let me guess, I need to carry following things:

• Diving gear.
• Sufficient supply of oxygen.
• Any medicines needed because of environment change.
• Food that will be appropriate.
• Equipment that I will need to survive, for e.g. a knife, pressure meter, compas etc.

Anti Pattern:

• Do not get baffled.
• Do not say you may not not be able to answer the question as it is not your area of expertise. Sometime the correctness of the answer is less important than the attempt.

Interviewer's interpretation:

• Logically good answer indicates your basic thinking is fine.
• Witty answer would show creativity.
• Any answer which is not right at least shows that you are willing to encounter problems even if you are not well-versed in it.