“…Always communicate to inspire” — How Mayur thinks BIG for his team
Meet Mayur Jain, who is an Engineering Manager at Urban Company and currently works on the Communications, Payments Platform.
Mayur joined us back in 2019 as a Software Development Engineer 3, and in just a little more than 1.5 years grew into the role of an Engineering Manager. Born and raised in Indore, he did his Engineering from NIT Jamshedpur. Apart from work, Mayur is passionate about movies, sports and music.
Mayur is currently based out of Gurgaon. As a leader, he believes in thinking big, not just for himself, but for his entire team keeping every individual’s goals and interests in mind.
Read on to find how Mayur leads and motivates his team.
What was your journey to joining Urban Company, and how have you grown since joining?
Back when I joined Urban Company in 2019 as an SDE-3, the organization, as always, was growing at a really good pace and was on the mission of solving challenging and meaningful problems. In my first year, I worked with a team of rockstar engineers and got to work on many projects — from ideation to execution, to solving real customer problems.
Through them, I was able to scale my skills up as well as acquire new ones such as conducting user research, using data analytics, aligning the team on a vision and driving outcomes with quality.
After a year, when I proved my capacity in handling my existing responsibilities as well as started to take up new ones, I was given the opportunity to move to my next role as an Engineering Manager.
This new role came with a tremendous amount of experience and helped me learn people management, operational excellence, team building, honing vision, building roadmaps for the team and a set of product projects that directly contributed to the organization’s top line metrics.
Over the span of 3 years, I have seen tremendous growth — as an individual, leader and a mentor.
I count myself privileged to have had the opportunity to work with the brightest minds, and be mentored by the best-in-class coaches.
What is something unique about your team here?
I admire the fact that almost everyone in my team is self-driven and has a company-first mindset.
What is the most common challenge that managers face while leading teams?
Moving into the role of a manager from an individual contributor role can easily make you forget about the larger goal, which, in my opinion, is improving the performance of both the individuals and the team, as a whole.
I believe it’s very important to understand the team members and their interests, and then provide the best opportunities to help them succeed in their goal.
In short, a manager has to go through a mindset shift — where his success is largely setting up his team for success.
What’s your personal mantra, and where did it come from?
From my experience working for 3 years at Urban Company, I consider the 3 tenets for excelling at leadership to be — Delivering outcomes, Growing people and Thinking big.
Delivering outcomes — A leader must always focus on outcomes with a high agency to deliver results.
Every meaningfully-sized project will have unanticipated roadblocks, along with presenting opportunities to learn.
I have learned to gain operational excellence in delivering results through razoring sharp focus combined with ruthless prioritization, phased releases, effective communication on the progress and recalibration of goals with stakeholders when things go off-track.
Growing People — If mentoring others and channeling their success doesn’t give you a personal deal of satisfaction, then you may not be in the right place.
Leaders must cultivate an innate need to find joy in leading teams and helping individuals grow in their career.
Over time, my seniors and my experience have taught me that my growth and success lies in the growth of my team, and this is something that I’ll carry with me forever.
Think Big — Don’t limit yourself to your current day-to-day goals. Understand the reason for the team’s existence, create a bold vision, and always communicate to inspire.
Re-iterate this vision every year and prepare a strategy that binds the big picture with the right teams. Tie most of the goals to business value, which makes it easier to animate it.
What is a piece of advice you give to new managers at Urban Company?
Like Marshal Goldsmith says — “What brought you here, won’t get you there.”
You have got to be an end-to-end operator now, take complete responsibility of delivering results & growing people in your teams.
You’ll have to motivate and enable them to create impact, become their best versions and have a fulfilling work life. Build and earn trust with everyone in the team and lead by example. Try to create context for everyone on the team.
Also, build horizontal connections with peers, other managers and co-workers, you’ll need a lot of support from them to succeed in the role.
There’ll be chaos but you’ll sail through it, enjoy the journey.🙂
Sounds like fun?
If you enjoyed this blog post, please clap 👏(as many times as you like) and follow us (@UC Blogger) . Help us build a community by sharing on your favourite social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).
You can read up more about us on our publications —
https://medium.com/uc-design
https://medium.com/uc-engineering
https://medium.com/uc-culture
If you are interested in finding out about opportunities, visit us at http://careers.urbancompany.com
