Tech.Zealot

Every manager feels like an imposter sometimes. Every manager was once new, stumbling through interviews and 1:1s and awkward conversations.

Inspired by the book The Making of a Manager, I’m writing this to document my struggles as a manager—hoping to let others know that they are not alone. The challenges are real.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38821039-the-making-of-a-manager

Transitioning from a big tech company to a startup, I took on the role of Lead Backend Engineer, and it has been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride.

On my first day, I found myself staring at a handful of Notion pages and GitHub repositories, unsure where to begin. The company was about 20 people strong, yet I felt completely lost. I was assigned Jira tickets with zero context and asked to review code that made little sense. Later that night, I was pulled into a production deployment meant to fix a bug—only to watch it introduce new ones that the team scrambled to triage. And there I was, in my squeaky chair, trying to figure out what this team was all about.

The environment was unfamiliar, but what threw me off even more was the technical stack. Backend development was done using NestJS—something I had never worked with before. Everything ran on AWS, unlike the internal cloud platforms in my previous companies, which were not only well-integrated but also free to use. Coding conventions were vague, and the codebase contained legacy code dating back three years.

Those were my first impressions, and even after a year, I still see the same imperfections—both in our team and in myself. But what has changed is my perspective. I now see the direction we’re headed.

In The Making of a Manager, the author talks about the three Ps of team management: Purpose, People, and Process. These pillars are crucial for building a team that doesn’t just function but moves forward. I plan to dive deeper into each of these in future posts as I continue to navigate the challenges of leadership. So stay tuned.

Startups are a daily battle for survival, and that constant pressure forces people to question their place. I’ve felt it, and I still do when we hit roadblocks in building this company. In a fast-paced environment, it’s easy to lose sight of core principles.

So let this be my personal testament—a reminder to push myself to become a better manager and to never forget what truly matters.