Learn, Adapt, Work Hard with Arun Subash Manickam

So initially, when you said you were part of the Cisco team, those days, again, working remotely, how do you get an appreciation for, let's say, where the product actually is being used and what kind of edge cases probably you need to consider?

So I think when I started my career in HCL and when you're doing for Cisco, it was very early in my career.

So you are just doing what we're told to do, right? So you, you never kind of try to understand more around the business case and what is the value of what you are doing and so on.

I would say for mostly like for my entire time at Excel, I was more focused on what was getting to me.

I was just trying to make sure I will deliver.

Some of these perspective of what is that you're doing? What is the impact? What is the bigger story of what you or your team doing? Those things change once I joined the startup company.

And

then

subsequently you started engaging with product managers.

Then you know why they are even defining these requirements and what is the business case? What is the business value? All these things come in, right? Like, so I started to appreciate more after my stint, starting my stint in Now you define everything for a bigger why, right? I think we don't do anything without a why and the impact.

So yes, I did not start my career that way.

But of course, I learned over time based on my role and tenure and the organizational maturity or started to question that and understand that more to relate yourself to what you're doing so that you can also disseminate some of this to your team.

uh being an individual contributor and then getting these specifications and then working towards that when you move to a startup of course then how was that you did say that they needed to understand the product management aspects and the requirements and all that but otherwise uh how was that transition for you Because you said you want something from being an IC to a manager, right?

Yeah, yeah, correct.

So if you ask me, I would strongly encourage anyone in their career to at least work for a startup at some point of time, right? Because a startup gives you very, very rich experience, which I don't think any other company which would give, right? So the big change for me when I joined a startup is the amount of work was abundant, right? There was no limit.

It was basically limitless because you always work with a lesser number of people trying to do more, right? So naturally you will learn more because you have so many things.

So you're not bounded by anything.

So you will learn more and you will always have the execution constraints of wanting to do quickly, doing more, taking shortcuts and so on.

So for me, transitioning from Salesisco to this Forsten startup was more learning those aspects, getting even adapted to that to even know, okay, so there are so many things to learn, I can actually it is basically when I would want to stop doing rather than somehow, like my work is limited, that is one, you get an exposure to understand things very deep down, because very few people so naturally anyone, anything to solve, you'll have to understand deep down, right? and you will always want to be very smart and execution right because you're not going to get months of timeline to do your things you have to be very smart on how quickly you can do and then iterate to make sure what you deliver is quality right like so i think i actually enjoyed both my startup skills exactly for the same reason because you get to know deep and of course you get the thrill of executing quickly and then seeing in front of your eyes the impact of what you are doing So I think that was the major transition when you move from a big service company to a startup.

But from an IT to manager, it is a... totally different kind of a transition of course i initially struggled to be a good manager and so on like because you still have your icy mindset because as a manager you're expected to do a few things and you know you because you are all adapting to the role of understanding the role so and i would not rate myself as a very good manager during my initial phases and i got a lot of candid feedback from some of the engineers whom i were close with where they took the liberty of giving me feedback and so on then i really understood okay management is not this it is something uh very different where you can't expect everyone to work the way you think you have to work or how you would work right it is very different and so i actually learned all those very after having not done very well in my initial three years so i would say anyone who wants to transition from ic to manager yeah so it is not just a easy transition someone has really understood what it takes to be a manager depending on what environment they are in, what kind of team they want to manage and kind of learn those things.

It doesn't, because the general thing is someone who is good in ICE can also be good as a manager.

That is actually a myth.

I don't think either way works.

Right? some people are extremely good also some are extremely good as a manager some are a good mix right like so you just need to assess which is your sweet spot and which you like right