I learnt management with the help of several amazing mentors in Singapore's tech ecosystem. I refined our hiring process, installed a transparent compensation system, increased employee retention and eventually trained three managers to replace myself.Īnd I did all of this in Vietnam, having no prior knowledge of Vietnamese culture or Vietnamese language when I started. Customers stopped yelling at us because we got more effective. Over the course of my tenure, I got rid of Saturday work days and reduced overtime work by over 90%. My team and I grew the company from 0 to nearly S$4.5 million in annual revenue in two years. My name is Cedric and I ran the engineering office for a Singaporean company called EPOS. The reason is that this guide contains immediately applicable advice designed to put you on the right path.Įvery manager has a unique, individual management style the purpose of this guide is to provide guardrails to make it quicker to find a form that works for you. But if you're putting the ideas into practice, my experience teaching these techniques tell me that an average manager will take six-eight months to gain proficiency with everything within.ĭon't let that number scare you, though! You're likely to see results even in the very first week you start practice. This guide should take no more than three hours to read from front to back. If you started out as an individual contributor in your startup - that is, a programmer, designer, marketer, or similar - and now find yourself responsible for other people's output, this guide is for you! How Long Will This Take? The Starter Manager Guide is for new managers in startups and organisations between 2-150 people. In this context, what you’ll want is the smallest possible set of techniques to be an effective manager, so that you may go back to the challenge of growing your startup / becoming a better programmer / growing as a designer / scoring more clients.Īnd you’ll want a first principles approach to management, so you may think through new processes as you implement them. And you never quite have enough resources to accomplish all that you desire to do. Processes that work in large companies don’t seem to work in smaller ones. In startups, things are blowing up all the time. If you're a new manager in a startup, it's unlikely that you'll have much time to get better.