Chapter 1 : Who is a Manager?
It’s the 28th of November 2025. This chapter was written on September 07th of 2024. I wanted to try writing a book about management based on my experiences, and this is me publishing it on my site. I hope you enjoy ; )
How I became a manager?
At the age of 21, stepping into the role of operations manager for a startup was an eye-opening experience. While my background was in software engineering, my responsibilities quickly expanded beyond the domain I was most comfortable in. Suddenly, I was managing not just the product, but customer success, internal operations, and the day-to-day growth of the company. This wasn’t a role I was trained for; it was something I had to learn on the fly.
But it was precisely this challenge, managing responsibilities that didn’t fall within my specialty, that shaped my approach to leadership. I realized early on that as a manager, I couldn’t afford to be hyper-focused on one domain. A manager, by necessity, must sacrifice specialization for generalization, becoming someone who sees the bigger picture and can guide the company’s various growth aspects.
In a way, this shift felt like the opposite of the deep exploration I was used to during my time studying physics, where I would spend hours trying to prove the Doppler effect or researching electromagnetic principles. I thrived on theory and analysis. But in the world of startup management, I couldn’t afford to linger on one problem for too long. Decisions needed to be made quickly, and my role as a manager required me to take ownership of not just one area but many.
This experience taught me that a manager is not just a specialist but a visionary, someone who must look beyond their personal preferences or expertise and guide the team toward broader company objectives. A manager needs to be adaptable, understanding enough of each part of the business to steer it in the right direction while knowing when to delegate and trust others.
The right setting
At my startup, we were just six people, a small but highly driven team of young, high-performance individuals. Each of us had a full plate, fully committed to pushing the company forward. We didn’t have the luxury of time, and every minute was spent on getting results. But as time passed, our CEO recognized something was missing, a manager to lead the team, someone who could provide direction and organization. He brought in several experienced managers, all highly qualified, but something was off.
Our team was unique. We were all under 25, full of energy, ambition, and a desire to move fast. The managers we interviewed, on the other hand, were in their early 30s, and while they brought a wealth of experience from larger corporations, their approach didn’t mesh with our fast-paced, startup culture. They focused on processes that felt rigid and, quite frankly, unnecessary at that stage. It felt like a mismatch, and instead of fuelling our growth, it seemed to slow us down.
It became clear that a manager for our team couldn’t be an outsider from a large company, trained in rigid frameworks. We needed someone who understood both management and our team, someone who could align with our culture of innovation, speed, and flexibility. That’s when the idea surfaced: the manager had to come from within. Someone who was already part of the team, who understood how we worked and who could lead from the inside.
Our CEO spotted something in me, A sense of responsibility that I brought to every project. I had a high task completion rate and was known for delivering results. Without realizing it, I was already managing projects informally. That’s when I was given the role of project manager. I had no formal training, no background in using tools like ClickUp for performance optimization, and no clue how to use Gantt charts to break down tasks for the newer hires. But I had a hunch, an instinct about how to approach it.
The fact that our team was small allowed me to experiment. One of the first things I did was dive into Agile frameworks for software development and project management. I wanted to replicate the efficiency of weekly sprint meetings and stand-up discussions, which I had read about in Agile methodologies. Slowly, I started drawing connections between my technical background and the world of management.
That’s when I realized something important: good managers are those who can connect the dots. They see the bigger picture but also have an innate curiosity about how things work at a granular level. They’re not just taskmasters, they’re problem solvers, people who can take a technical or complex situation and streamline it into a process. They don’t come with rigid frameworks but can create them from scratch when needed, adapting as they go.
In our case, a manager didn’t come from the outside with years of corporate experience. A manager was made from within the team, a person who understood the dynamics of the team, had a passion for results, and knew how to innovate around the challenges they faced. A manager is someone who takes responsibility, not just for their own tasks, but for the growth and well-being of the entire team. They adapt, learn, and find ways to bring the best out of everyone, while always keeping an eye on the ultimate goal: results.