Three Lessons That I Have Learned About Managing People
When Sagar and I started Koalah, we didnât anticipate managing so many people so soon. Nine months after beginning, we are running a startup of five employees. Throughout the process, we have learned many important lessons. Additionally, books like Principles by Ray Dalio and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie have influenced our management style. I have listed the three most important lessons that I have learned while running a startup.
1) âYou never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.â âLee Harper
Sagar and I are very complementary in our skill sets. He is more of a product person, while I am more of a businessperson. This works very well, especially in a startup setting, but sometimes becomes frustrating when discussing topics about which we arenât experts. A good friend of mine told me to take a breath and imagine being the other personâto try imagine how he or she is viewing the problem. Sagar and I will sometimes get annoyed with one another when we have frustrating days at work. Now, when we debate product features or strategy and the discussion becomes heated, we take a step back, breathe, and resume talking. This has really helped us to communicate better. We have stopped wasting time debating petty issues and our work process has become more efficient. Most importantly, we have become better friends because we have the ability to empathize with one another as well as the people with whom we work.
 2) âA successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her.â âDavid Brinkley
The most successful people in life surround themselves with people smarter than them. This is what we have been doing at our company. We are very lucky to have a world-class development team that complements Sagar and myself. We each grow and learn from each other. Going into a startup, I was completely non-technical. Luckily, with the help of Anindya, one of our engineers, I have completed Learn Python the Hardway and begun to learn Django. My technical abilities are not even close to being able to contribute to our code base, but I can now understand the technical decisions that our engineers make and try to lend a hand every so often. The process has also taught me to have trust in the people with whom Iâm working. When we launched our beta, we were hacked four times. It was very hard to sit back and hope that engineers could fix it. They were on the spot every time something broke. It was great! We were able to lay a foundation for our company where we now have great people who do front-end, back-end, UI/UX, and sales.
 3) âThe single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.â âGeorge Bernard Shaw
Our CTO, Matt, is on the West Coast. He is one of the best Python developers I know. Sagar and I have been very grateful to have him on the team. We have a distributed team and itâs very important to communicate clearly what we need from a product perspective. At times I think that Sagar and I have been vague to Matt about product strategy. This is something that we have been working very hard on correcting. Jennifer, one of the partners at the accelerator we are at, gave us the tactic where instead of asking yes or no questions, we need to ask questions that are open-ended. An example of this recently was deciding whether we are doing desktop, mobile games, or both. Instead of asking, âcan you build a portal for building mobile games?â we asked, âhow do you envision this portal?â We then had a discussion on mobile versus desktop. This helped Matt have a better understanding of what we were doing because it allowed us to speak for 20 minutes about features and specifications of each portal. If we had asked a yes or no question, he would have just tried to build something where we didnât really discuss the product.
There is still much I have left to learn about managing, but so far I am glad with the progress that I made. The best way to continue to learn is by doing.
