How do you motivate your team?

This is a really good question. I think it goes back to how you would want to be working with a team of people, and how you communicate with them in a way that keeps them motivated, so that; there’s enough room for them to innovate by themselves and approach the problem from a different perspective than I would, but at the same time achieve the goal.

I know it’s kind of an abstract answer, let me tell you a story about two different leadership styles. Let’s look at two scenarios — you are with a group of people and you’re stranded on an island, and you want them to build a ship that sails us all out of there, one way to do that is that you talk about how to build it, and get all the raw materials and then plan it out and drive the project, or you can talk about how great it would be to see the beautiful sunsets out there on the sea, describe how breath-taking the marine life out there is, and you can tell them about all the awesome things and adventures that you can get up to when you’re out on the sea and then let them build the means to get there.

So, the second example is probably more of my style, I am definitely more of a person who talks to people about what kind of experiences we should be building. I like to lead with statements that allow people to find a way to get there and WaveMaker is a kind of a technical product, in the sense, it’s targeted towards developers. So, the team members that I work with, they themselves are developers, and they’re experiencing the process of developing a product themselves. So, they have done it, and they have an opinion in terms of — how to go about it. And, certainly their ideas and how they would solve the problem for a low-code marketplace are very important to me.

The way I work with teams of people is that there’s a lot of room for them to contribute on what could be a potential solution and not everything is extremely well specified I would say.

There’s a lot of ability within the team to work on a problem statement that is not extremely well defined, but they help with the definition; and then make the product, and work on improvements. From their point of view, they contribute. So, I would definitely like to work with people at that level where they have the room in their mind, and I give them the space to contribute to how you solve the problem.

Most of the things we are working on are targeted towards professional developers, which is easy to empathize with for our product team, because it's a set of developers making something for the end customer — a developer, whose work is very similar to ours.