Management Philosophy & Default Style

Management Philosophy & Evolution

My journey started with studying computer science for 6 years (2000-2006), 2 years in high school and 4 years in college, graduated from IIT Guwahati in computer science in 2006, after that have been working for last 20 years in the software industry, with first 10 years running startups (first one in advertising and second in communication domain), next 10 years working in fintech domain at larger organisations like Flipkart, Razorpay and Rippling.

The high level management philosophy I have followed in a nutshell is that, for effectively managing something (org / product / system / project / initiative / self etc.), the core competency needed for that something (can be tech skills / product capability / domain expertise / awareness) is primary and management skills or tactics are only supplemental. Management can’t operate in a vacuum and requires heavy contextualization to be effective. I have always focused more on learning from every experience (failures & successes) than to form a fixed lens or worldview on management.

Focus Dimensions / Axes

The following dimensions are basically the orthogonal axes for focus, which enables thinking of management as basically doing some level of trade-off on these 2 dimensions of focus.

• Impact <> Excellence
  • This axis in simple terms is outcome focus. Impact being concrete / practical / short term / unsustainable focus, while Excellence being the aspirational / ideal / long term / sustainable focus. Excellence is divergence from reality towards ideal while impact brings convergence back to reality. Shifting focus from impact driven culture to excellence driven culture given move from smaller startup in advertising & communication to larger organisations with mission critical charter, heavily oriented towards fintech domain.
  • Impact-driven culture - Prioritizes shipping features and outcomes that move business metrics and customer value. Shorter feedback loops, experiments, and clear outcome ownership are common. Excellence-driven culture - Prioritizes craftsmanship, technical quality, maintainability, and best-practice engineering (tests, architecture, reliability). Focused engineering / product / operational excellence initiatives increases long-term velocity and product quality but sometimes in short term, can be mistaken for “engineering for its own sake.”
  • Excellence combined with Impact - It’s important to build resilient engineering practices (excellence) while keeping them tightly linked to business priorities (impact), few examples of losing track of this
    • Platform building is a good example of losing sight of impact & going into rabbit hole of excellence, sometimes diverging from reality and struggling for adoption later
    • Getting stuck in wrong trade-off discussion around quantity vs quality (mostly need to balance with hybrid approach) or breadth vs depth (balance required with hybrid approach), also sometimes one enables the other - high quantity of knowledge can enable quality, heavy depth on fundamentals will enable breadth of experience
    • Resilience is mainly used with reference to ability to recover from failures , basically the engineering practice which can recover when a person/process/product/system failure happens, one good example is practice of having checklist (design/development/deployment/operation) which works well well independent of the person, process, product or system. Another example is peer review (product spec review or tech spec review or code review, incident postmortem review) which prevents blind spots and improves rigor, much earlier in the lifecycle.
    • Excellence takes much more time than impact expectation in most cases and many times impatience gets many quick wins and smaller but visible impact, which makes people discard excellence as a theoretical and not valuable concept.
• Execution <> Innovation
  • Execution being the progressive / realistic / immediate day to day focus, while Innovation being disruptive / unreal / beyond time horizon and sustainability aspect. Execution is the way to do things the proven way. Innovation is what breaks the existing cycle, out of box or out of cycle thinking is what results in exponential or step-function change.
  • Execution focused culture - incentivises & rewards high velocity work along with streamlined & predictable execution delivering consistent results which in turn reduces the risk of failing to deliver but increasing the risk of failing to innovate. Innovation driven culture focuses more on generating & pursuing new ideas while driving novel ways of working. Risk taking is appreciated instead of predictability & consistency.
  • Combining execution & innovation is challenging and only few people I have seen being successful at this, with clear understanding of when & what kind of innovation is feasible & will bring more value than simpler & incremental execution.

The management focus I have followed has significantly evolved over time, skewing more on Innovation > Execution, Impact > Excellence in the first ten years or my career running startups, while now after working in fintech industry for last ten years, the management focus shifted on the Execution > Innovation, Excellence > Impact, which also reflects the uncompromising need for excellence in finance domain due to higher demand of accuracy & reliability while bit less emphasis on innovation.

Underlying Principle

But the underlying principle for the above 2 dimensions is truth centricity or truth alignment, which is the most critical aspect I have kept in mind and it’s not another independent dimension.

• Truth seeking - Information can mislead - very popular & common concept, evidence based approach to knowing, experience based learning, not taking words as wisdom & trust as the multiplier or signifier for truth. It basically means knowing the blindspots & pitfalls, having awareness of the unknown, while respecting & acknowledging ignorance. After relying on hearsay information once which then badly backfired, I have ever since ensured that I always have clear evidence in form of screenshot, dashboard, data analysis for statements made. This has acted as a forcing function for truth seeking.
• Truth evangelizing - Be a friend not friendly - providing truthful feedback without sugar coating is more helpful than being friendly. A senior individual in general needs frank feedback but also a bit of debate to reflect, as a person with 10+ years experience will not change unless strong self reflection is triggered by something, to focus inward & put effort towards changing both behavioral & situational aspects.
• Truth alignment - Truthful with reality - this is slightly different than seeking & evangelizing as even with sufficient evidence + feedback + reflection, there can still be misalignment of understanding of truth vs reality of truth, this divergence is mainly caused by delay in decision or lack of effort or out of control constraints, to converge truth in understanding to reality. This is more like zooming out to see the misalignment and taking steps to bring alignment.

Useful Tenets

• Structured thinking is very important but equally important is to keep flexibility to go beyond the structure which has been put in place by yourself or others to not always think inside the box. An example is the “Why → What → How” framework, a simple hierarchy of decision-making
  • Why / Understanding — start with worldview, intentions, hypotheses. Only after clarifying “why,” define what you aim to achieve.
  • What / Objective & Key Results — once you know the why and outcome metrics, you set what needs to be done (goals, outputs). ‘
  • How / Implementation — only after “why” and “what” are clear, you decide the “how.” This makes your implementation more flexible and grounded.
  • This order helps to avoid tunnel vision & narrow focus on implementation without clear objective or purpose — a common trap in engineering work. But knowing the limitations of this framework (investment required should justify the ROI, this can’t reduce the risk of unknowns & uncertainty), along with the underlying assumptions (availability of knowledge & time to move up this hierarchy for decision making), is critical to avoid using it as hammer to nail every problem.
• Embracing, Facilitating But Monitoring Change is an important way to learn, unlearn & relearn while also keeping a boundary around change.
  • Change has many layers / aspects and so do lack of change - these aspects tend to be different at different time horizons. Example - thinking nobody changes may be correct in the short run, but is wrong in the long time horizon as it takes a long time for people to change. Another example - Change in skill (upgrade or degrade) will sometimes take significant time but monitoring closely can easily show trends in a smaller time window to manage soon.
  • Change / Lack of Change has many dimensions - can (constraints), should (utility), will (motivation vs effort), want (awareness of impact) and when (timeline) are some important ones. Monitoring or observing changes with some detachment has helped in being aware & having less resistance to embrace change. Many times changes are incorrectly perceived due to false understanding of truth / higher invariant, which can enable discarding the changes in the lower plane, as being contextually not relevant in higher planes.
  • Change / Lack of change is not always controllable - as in the popular serenity prayer, wisdom is to know the difference between things that you can change and things you can’t change, along with having courage to change things you can while having acceptance for things you can’t change. One practical example in engineering is changing people’s behaviour is far more difficult than changing product / system behaviour. But if constraints make product / system change impractical / infeasible, it will be prudent to train people even with some difficulty.
• Celebrating, Respecting, Encouraging Higher Goals is a critical part of building a happier & healthier individuals, teams & org.
  • Higher goals like diversity, meaning, growth need encouragement & celebration but without mandating it as to make it feel like a burden.
  • Diversity of thoughts, culture, background, practices, personalities, demographics are important, should be celebrated and respected as long as it’s in a contextually acceptable range for the team and organisation but not mandated. Merit and skill will always beat any mandate or criteria in long term when it comes to probability of success in the role, and the talent density being an important factor for success as a group, it’s important to not have mandates which affect talent density
  • Meaning brings satisfaction in a job, but it’s still a higher goal which should be pursued by individuals and not mandated as every thing can not have deep meaning but they will still provide heavy tactical utility. Sometimes encouraging and facilitating higher goals doesn’t work well when value is not understood, shown and appreciated, which can’t be solved with a mandate rather than a cultural shift.
  • Individual growth is a higher goal for people to pursue at their own pace, making it mandatory or expected, having an aggressive timeline results in many unwanted side-effects, people doing career growth hacking with promotion oriented projects, prioritising personal growth over team and organisation development. Have seen some examples - an engineer becoming EM to only realise they didn’t want the manager’s adhocness, schedule & pressure, another example of engineer pushing to get to next level but without looking for step function change in way of operating.
  • Higher goals along with talented people are generally very important to create teams working without too many rules and processes, just having talent density doesn’t necessarily bring discipline to succeed, it’s the higher goal which inspires people.
• Thinking Tools - Have always been fascinated by thinking tools (particularly after reading “Intuition Pump & Other Thinking Tools”), as deep thinking is difficult & requires advanced tools.
  • Primary thinking tool like mental models like circle of core competence, falsability by experience, first principles thinking, higher order thinking, occam’s razor, ranson’s razor
  • Another very useful tool is developing intuition (heavily used by Andrew Ng in the ML specialization & Deep Learning specialization courses) and using intuition pumps (something which pumps intuition in desired direction).
  • Another one is using Nuance as the thinking tool, which can help in avoiding early conclusions & strong opinions, that are generally a way to disguise ignorance or may be sometimes skip deep thinking, also preventing tendencies for prescriptive thinking.

Default Management Style

I have been managing very diverse teams (by experience, talent, culture etc.) while working on varied challenges and the management style has changed / adjusted significantly depending on various scenarios. There is some benefit in general to have a default style of management to avoid daily surprises but it can soon become dogmatic, flexibility & adaptability has been a key behavioral trait to keep.

• Default Style - The default style I follow is being supportive to the next set of leads whenever possible & feasible - supporting my team with a combination of inspiration + guidance + verification, while providing team with framework & mental model to be as much independent & autonomous as practically possible
  • Inspiration is more of long term strategic vision / mission / org / charter etc.
  • Guidance is more on tactical management challenges around operation / execution / org / talent / communication etc.
  • Verification is more for ensuring things don’t fall through cracks over time
  • While limiting the deeper daily intervention, only when the situation is in crisis or can get into crisis soon, and when the failure will be detrimental
• Important Aspects - Few important aspects in managing larger teams with 2+ management layer requires
  • Growing senior talent - Creating opportunities for folks which are aligned with business while also stretching them to make step function changes in their learning & career is a critical way to retain senior talent while also helping them grow.
  • Risk management - creating next set of leaders & managers is generally not enough & there is need for strong succession plan, along with shadow / reverse shadow with them is critical to ensure continuity of context
  • Role model behaviour - displaying role model behaviour to solve problems which can be cleanly replicated - excellence initiatives, ticket commander process, design and post mortem reviews, domain expertise
  • Long term alignment - Aligning product charter / system design / org structure at larger org, team and individual level for long term success, without overlooking the current realities and constraints
  • Momentum driven execution - Generally momentum is what lifts-off large initiatives spanning teams and using momentum driven execution has helped in getting projects to a critical milestone - first & last mile delivery always need momentum.
• Scenarios & Examples - Some examples using above management style during last few org experiences helped in ensuring
  • Stalled Projects - Have several examples of unblocking stalled projects across previous companies. Meta learning has been that momentum on those projects got lost, either due to past failure or the lost project driver, bringing back some excitement + getting a few smaller wins + making incremental progress helped in moving these along with establishing clear project driver for long run (not always project lead as most the stalled project has spanned across teams).
  • Turnaround & De-Risking Critical Path - Gone through a few examples of turning around areas (team + product + system) which have been struggling for sometime. Also, removing existential system / product / market / business risk (which can be due to various reasons). Meta learning has been to evaluate & understand situation with deeper thinking & planning on risk management + sustained execution, as these situation need multiple short term wins with strong focus on long running goal
  • Performance & Growth - Performance gaps are not always due to lack of intent or agency or even skill set, it’s due to lack of ability to bring impact or drive excellence. Generally people in tech companies work hard to get faster growth, but without strong sponsorship (sponsor is not just mentor or coach), it takes a lot more time. Meta learning has been that a combination of inspiration + guidance + verification is what helps senior ICs & managers grow.
  • Alignment & Process - Alignment & process reduces chaos and provides structure to operate. It doesn’t always directly cause impact or excellence, but without it have seen things getting very inconsistent. Meta learning has been that without thought through structure, freedom means innovation when no pressure but under pressure things become inconsistent and inefficient.