Leadership principles: My experience so far @huddleup @bytezee
While working on my startup managing a team of 10-15 people, initially it was out of control but slowly learned the way and my mentor and Co-founder Aditya taught me what his mentors passed to him. Still learning, still growing.
Good leader lead well and manage well. A great leader lead, manage and most importantly he create new leaders.
In this article, I will share my experience as a leader and my learning from Amazon’s Leadership Principles, Ray Dalio Principles, and other sources. Because learning, compiling, and passing it on, is the way.
Customer Obsession
“Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”
Amazon has been described as the world’s most customer-centric business, and this principle is a testament to that. Most companies are competition-focused and want to make sure they do not fall behind. Amazon, on the other hand, looks at its entire business through the eyes of the customer.
Ownership
Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”
When you fail in a project, taking full responsibility and ownership for that failure is expected. Ownership is synonymous with accountability.
Invent and Simplify
Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
Are Right, A Lot
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
Learn and Be Curious
Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
Hire and Develop the Best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
Insist on the Highest Standards
Leaders have relentlessly high standards— many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
Think Big
Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.
Bias for Action
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
Frugality
Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.
Earn Trust
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
Deep Dive
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
Deliver Results
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
My experience while leading teams at @huddleup and @bytezee
Discipline
As a leader I learned, discipline is a very important part of team building and throughout the journey, it is important as a team habit.
Discipline to write agenda before posting any meeting schedule: Write your agenda even if it’s a one-liner, but write it.
Discipline to be present at meetings on time: If the leader of the pack doesn’t come on time, the team member's confidence in the leader gets reduced sometimes, and it’s a good disciple to be on time.
Product Sense
It is the most important and basic skill of a founder or any leader if going in the direction of building something.
Painkiller vs Protein Products
Product Perspective
Product market fit
Documenting User stories
Psychology and UI/UX
How to sell a product
Product target audience profiling
Creating stories and storytelling about the product and its solution to the problem.
Meetings
Before posting the meeting schedule, attach the agenda of the meeting
Keep one team meeting, and don't waste developers’ time on meeting
Standup meetings should be clean and one way, to get weeks or days before updates or to just assign tasks. max 15 to 30 mins. Categorize it Assign Tasks, Brainstorming, solve problems, etc.
Write before doing anything - Write. Rewrite. Revise. Then do.
Before any meeting or any presentation or any brainstorming, just take out pen and paper or open gedit/notion/doc just write whatever your actions will be, if tomorrow morning I have to take a standup, I will write something like this:
Standup:
Asks for updates about react bugs
API delivery of delete schema
Sales target or mails if the sales team
Nothing, just writing gives clarity to the mind even if it’s one line. For me when solving a problem or brainstorming new ideas, I just write things on blank paper just going with the flow, new ideas, and perspective flows as I write.
The temptation is to jump straight into building mode, to write code or build wireframes or sketch drafts of what you want to create. The better idea is to write your idea down as a way to think it through and improve upon it. Then, when you start building, you’ll know exactly what to build, and why, and you’ll have pre-written documentation at launch.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos agreed, famously insisting on every meeting starting with 4-page memos instead of PowerPoint presentations. “The reason writing a good 4-page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20-page PowerPoint,” wrote Bezos in an internal email, “is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and a better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related.”
So when Bezos—in a possibly apocryphally, 128-word memo—wrote that “All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces,” it was a focused idea that led to Amazon building web services for which it’d be its own best customer, and turned AWS into the cloud computing juggernaut it is today.
The tradition is carried on to the latest AWS services. When Amazon sets out to build a new service, says Amazon machine learning engineer Eugene Yan, "before writing any code, engineers spent 18 months writing documents on how best to serve customers." Once they start coding, they know exactly who will be using the product, why they're using it, and what they anticipate the service will provide.
Vision
As a co-founder, the vision of the creator is sometimes not in sync with everyone, or the builders and operators.
Sharing the vision and getting on the same page while starting a startup or any project is very very very important for leaders. You have to put your developers, designers, sales teams, and your team in the same vision as you are thinking, share what is your vision, why you have these and that features, how are you going to sell it, and who will you sell your product and all. Because without vision your team will be just a “Cog in the System”, your developers or designers do what is in Jira tickets or assigned tasks it’s like creating something from mould, if your share vision with your team they will come up with new ideas, they will explore themselves with their own perspective to do things, and it’s a very creative way of leading people.
Responsibility & Ownership
When I hire or am about to hire someone I just ask one thing - “How do you define yourself as a responsible person or How much do you rate yourself on a 1 to 10 scale for taking responsibility?”
Responsibility and Ownership are two different things, but as a leader two merge and create something new.
If your responsibility is to do the XYZ thing, you own it and it’s your 100% responsibility.
Before giving someone a new feature I make it very clear that this is your responsibility and you own it if it breaks it is you If it builds it is you, and always 100%.
Giving 4 team member a single project define 4 modules or 8 modules very any permutation combination tasks, works anything very clearly, and define ownership and responsibility, if not defined properly things go wrong, someone does the work and someone else takes the credit same goes for south direction if anything breaks.
Problem Solving
In a tech startup, the leader must know what’s going on, right now I’m CTO at bytezee.com and before that, I was at huddleup.tech, it’s the role and responsibility of the CTO to learn and know things before teams use them. If starting a new project CTO must have a thorough knowledge of architecting the codebase and the whole product.
If CTO or team leader knows how and why of a product and understands the atomic level of code then, he can lead people way better than anyone else.
Guide your team, best practices and keep up to date with the latest trends.
For debugging and problem-solving we don’t directly jump or don’t start looking for a solution, ask some questions about why this happens, and get root cause analysis. Ask the team to use inversion model, like how to not make this code run, when this code will not work absolutely, start from root to the end of the branch, it’s an effective way to get code thoroughly and debug. There are many ways to debug but inversion debugging works.
Play Devil’s Advocate while brainstorming or reviewing
If someone comes with any new ideas or while brainstorming play devil’s advocate. Ask why. Why will I take this idea? Or Why this will work?
Devil’s advocate work for anything, going to sales, why we should go to sell to SaaS startup why not retail companies.? While answering these questions you will get lots of insight and increase the depth of the solution with proper reasoning.