“If you can plan it well, you can do it!” — Sourabh’s mode of operating and dealing with challenges.
Meet Sourabh Jajoria, Senior Engineering Manager at Urban Company.
Back in 2018, Sourabh joined UC as an SDE 2. Fast forward to 4+ years, he leads two teams — in Gurugram and Bengaluru, and is leading the way for multiple themes at Urban Company.
When Sourabh’s not working, he loves to paint, read (mostly non-fiction), explore various movie genres and focus on keeping himself fit and healthy.
Read on to find how Sourabh leads and motivates his team.
What was your journey to joining Urban Company, and how have you grown since joining?
During my last year of college, I got placed at a Robotics firm. In my first job, I got a good exposure to algorithmic problems, functional programming, concurrency models and hardware interactions.
When I look back, the highlight of my time over there was the ownership I displayed and the execution of complex projects around deadlock resolution, navigation and human safety protocols which were very crucial for the organization to scale internationally.
Later, I started exploring consumer facing domains to gain more breadth. My batchmates who were working at UC spoke highly of the organization, and therefore, I applied here. Through the interviews with the panel and the interactions that followed, I got a good sense of the company, its people, culture and the tech.
I joined UC in October 2018 in the Partner Success Team (now known as the Supply Vertical Team). It took around 2 months initially to find my feet, adapting to the ways of working at UC, but soon enough, I started enjoying solving problems and working closely with the product and business teams.
Initial highlights of my time at UC were end-to-end automation projects we worked on directly with multiple business teams around onboarding of partners. That really gave me a good sense of solving problems away from the code boundaries.
From there on, leaders started trusting me with more complex problems, be it tech, culture, processes and projects over time. I take pride in the kind of people I have got to work with over the years, especially in the tech team.
We set up various systems from the ground up, created a standardised way for developing and designing microservices at UC with Project Zen, and helped businesses achieve targets over the years.
From a Senior Engineer, I eventually transitioned into a leader at UC. Aiding my team members’ growth has been a fulfilling experience. A lot of my experiences as a Senior Engineering Manager have made me learn so much more beyond tech.
What is something unique about your team here?
What I find unique about my team is the compounding effect of the diverse set of personalities we have.
Everyone has their own journey, different highlights, different perspective and different personal goals. When it comes to landing critical projects, everyone is ready to step-up, help out each other and win as a team.
My team is known to have high standards on quality (functional or non-functional) in UC’s Engineering team.
What really pleases me is how each of them is willing to give back to the Engineering team in terms of sharing their learnings, helping out with better code/design and even mentor new joinees in the organisation. They are awesome folks!
What is the most common challenge that managers face while leading teams?
I wouldn’t want to generalise, but from my experience it’s the lack of clarity and depth as a leader that causes issues in all major tangents.
Lack of depth on the growth path of the mentees would make it harder for them to realise their goals with UC. Lack of clarity on a plan for the team, be it quarter/monthly, will lead to vagueness in team execution and troublesome stakeholder management.
Lack of depth on the systems will vastly limit the leader’s value-add in technical discussions. Lack of tech vision for the team makes it harder to judge on whether a problem should be solved or not. Lack of depth on team members’ well-being creates gaps within the team.
What’s your personal mantra, and where did it come from?
Well, this one is hard to explain but I’ll pick something I used to tell myself years back —
If you can plan it well, you can do it.
This mantra has evolved over time but primarily came from my early phases as an Engineer where I used to push myself to go deep in pre-dev (what you do before actual coding for a project) to come-up with a detailed design to align stakeholders on solution, timelines, constraints, release plan and then go all out with execution.
As a tech leader, this evolved to working with product managers and leaders on having a clear quarter plan at project x team member level, giving proper clarity to everyone on what to expect in coming months.
As a manager I’ve used this in planning growth paths for my team members and regularly discussing the progress for the same.
What is a piece of advice you give to new managers at Urban Company?
Invest in each and every of your team member with all honesty irrespective of their skillset and personality differences. Understand what they want and what motivates them.
Taking some past examples of the wants from my Engineering team of different individuals: going deeper into backend, growing into a senior engineer, hands-on with all UC tech, having good visibility in the Engineering team etc.
Then create opportunities for the team members to shine. Once they are in the limelight, be there to acknowledge it wholeheartedly.
Most importantly figure out your leadership style that aligns with your strength.
For me personally being transparent in decision-making has been the way.
Sounds like fun?
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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
