Ummmm, so this is just a life update, nothing spicy here.
So, after the depressive episode and the amazing trip I took to the Himalayas, I joined this young well funded startup.
The environment was tense and people were working hard, trying to pick up problems to be solved, at times lacking direction because there was just too much to clean up.
Since I had worked for the company and the founder before, I was expected to pick things up very quickly and that comfort allowed me to pick up things on my own.
Which was a starting of problems, when you trust someone with tasks, you don’t provide directions, you expect the person to figure out stuff.
Startups are a busy place, they mostly come without HRs and someone from the team performing the HR duties.
Which resulted into a complete mess of things, I didn’t know my role, what was expected out of me, how the company operated and who were the people I was supposed to work with.
I was expecting the founder, also the CEO to guide me through these and he was expecting me to define them for him, and thus the evident communication gap.
And as the pressure to raise funds grew, I started seeing less and less of him, and at times he was so burdened that I didn’t feel comfortable consulting him or updating him on things I was working on, this further increased the communication gap.
While I navigated through finding team members and their capability and understanding how much I could rely on them to get certain tasks done.
I took on some much evident and urgent tasks, got it designed, made so many design and logical decisions, but didn’t document them because I wasn’t aware I had to, I was too new to Product Management and since I was the first product hire, there were no existing examples to look at and i didn’t know if I had to because I had never seem my manager (the CEO) do it.
One thing that I realized working for this company is, speed is irrelevant when you are going in the wrong direction or you compromise on quality to achieve that speed.
Most things in implementation here were half baked, there were critical decisions which were postponed or just neglected, because of a culture which believed in pushing things out first and figuring the rest tomorrow, rather than pushing things right, but as you know, tomorrow never comes.
Everyone was working on so many tasks that it was almost impossible to keep a track of things, let alone optimize past tasks. This pushed us to failure where any task which had not reached failure was neglected no matter how important it was.
While the founder was busy on calls with investors, which definitely seemed the most important task at the moment given the urgency, he had taken a step back from operations inside the company.
The founder had a direction set in his mind, but since he was busy with investor meetings, he failed to communicate that direction to the team and at times it would translate into episodes of visible frustrations.
In a few weeks, the tension eased, the founder was back on the floor, talking to team members and helping them move things, I was asked to clear the mess and assigned clear goals, I started moving in the given direction.
While I moved to set up a process, acquire resources from other teams to get going and optimize the process, we were seeing positive signs from the founder in terms of getting investments.
He was giving subtle hints, giving numbers and figures that he would have to allocate to the process I was leading, and giving me pointers on how to improve my people management skills if I had to lead a 10 people team, all pointing towards an upcoming funding event.
The process I had started had started showing results, though 1/5th of the original target provided, we were off to a start, in the following weeks, I optimised the process to make it 2X more efficient than original target.
At the very same time, the founder was on a trip to seek investment and we all had our hopes high considering the events in the last month.
It was a Monday, I was travelling the following week and had list of things to be discussed before I left and that is exactly why I had asked him to make time and let me know when he was available for a discussion.
The entire day had passed and he still hadn’t found time to discuss and had kinda been avoiding me the whole day.
At the end, he asks me to come into a cabin, me very excited because I had over achieved the weekly target and had solid plans for the upcoming week follows him in.
And then he starts with explaining the funding situation, how it was going to impact the direction of the company and that as a result of cost cutting measure I was being laid off with others.
The company was evidently slipping into survival mode, hoping to make a comeback someday as and when the funding arrived.
And I am a person who wants to work on growth, even if I would have stayed, it would have been impossible for me to sustain, with no developers to build features and optimize, product managers become helpless.
Moreover the product I was working, was being put on hold and the focus was being shifted to the other side of the company and the company trying to make money off of it.
And yes, there were mistakes made in the company and yes we failed to acknowledge or correct them as an organization but going lean, going into survival mode was the right and the only possible move to be made.
I don’t know what was right or wrong above, but this was my POV into what was happening in the company I was working for.
So yess, this february when a lot of them were getting laid, I was getting layed off.
Cheers to the first Lay off and hopefully no more to come.
