Daring — Culture Tenets @ Hotstar

TL;DR; At Hotstar, we are building a very special Engineering team. As we grow in strength and surround ourselves with folks we love to work with, there is a keen focus on the pillars of culture that we’re building our team on. Come work with us for Radical Candour, No Bullshit, No Politics, Risk Obsession and a pure Meritocracy.

Dare or Stay There

If you’re stuck in Bangalore traffic, and you know you are, chances are that you’ve seen some Hotstar Tech hoardings. The message is simple — Dare or Stay There. The simplest messages though tend to pack in the most punch. We’re onto something very special here at Hotstar, and, this journey is not easy. The word “Dare”, was the easy bit. As we strengthen our team, we always keep an eye on our core values.

Bi-Directional Candor

Candor means “the quality of being open and honest; frankness.”. Chances are you’ve heard about Radical Candor. At Hotstar, we practice what I like to term, “Bi-Directional Candor”. We are building a culture where every person on the team, regardless of where they stand in the hierarchy has a voice and is encouraged to express their POV.

In my opinion, the Indian work culture in general is not very welcoming to candor. It’s not appreciated. Questioning a senior is taboo. Asking questions, in general, is taboo. That’s a separate deep dive by itself. In our team, we encourage questions up and down the organization, because it’s so essential. Being transparent with the team is key.

Candor doesn’t come naturally. Candor comes in an environment of trust. An environment where there is no fear of repercussions for expressing opinions. The cornerstones of such an environment are honesty, transparency and truth. These are tenets to live by in our team.

Ask a question and get an honest answer. Operating on assumptions is always a recipe for dis-trust. Bi-directional candor is core value at Hotstar.

Bullshit, Umm, No Thank You

We spend a significant amount of our lives at work. We want to ensure that every minute that you are at work, you can focus on doing your best work, bereft of bull-shit.

Our philosophy is to let builders build. It’s easier to simplify always. We groom our team to focus their efforts on solving high value problems as opposed to battling with things that in the grand scheme of things add little or no value.

This sometimes means going up against ingrained processes. We are not the least common denominator.

No Politics

Optics. All Talk and No Walk. Managing upwards. Manipulating outcomes. Hot air. Playing favourites. No. None of that and their cousins are welcome at Hotstar. Zero tolerance for any politicking. That’s just bull-shit and we ain’t having none of that. Doesn’t matter if you walk on water, take it down the road please.

It’s OK To Fail

A team’s appetite for failure is tested when there are real failures. One of the best examples of this is captured here by GitLab. This distils the philosophy in our team. We don’t have all the answers. If we don’t fail, we won’t learn and we won’t get strong. It’s OK to fail, learn and adapt. We hire the smartest of folks on our team and we trust them to do their best work at Hotstar. Sometimes, there will be glitches, and that’s OK. Rally together, solve it and move on. Make it better so that we make ourselves stronger. Use failure as a learning opportunity.

Over+Over Communicate

We have teams in three locations, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bangalore. Most teams are spread over two locations. As the team grows, it’s very easy to live in your silos and it’s very easy for things to slip through the cracks. Communication is foundational.

Communicate First. Communicate Often. Embrace asynchronous communication. Everyone is busy, leave a message if you don’t find someone the first time rather than leave a “Hi” message. Make your communication count. It’s OK to say it multiple times. Saying it more times is better than not saying it at all. Lack of communication, leads to mis-understandings, bad assumptions and broken coordination.

To re-purpose a Yoda quote : Lack of communication is the path to the failure. Low communication leads to bad assumptions. Bad assumptions leads to bad decisions. Bad decisions leads to failure.

Executing and delivering at this scale needs a high bar on communication.

Ask For Forgiveness, Not Permission

As a leader, you constantly groom your team to internalize your core values so that increasingly, when faced with situations, the team makes decisions that rally to your core tenets. Rome, however, was not built in a day. Some organizations take the track of command and control — that in our opinion slows you down. We only believe in going faster.

In the meantime, we encourage our leaders and our team to not wait around for permission. Did we mention that we hire the smartest folks? We empower our team to make decisions if they feel that it is in the best interest of the product and the company. We trust their judgement. We’ll live with the risk of the times when we didn’t quite get it right. We’ll learn and we’ll keep getting better.

Don’t wait to do what you believe, strongly, is the right thing to do.

Daring & Daring More

We’re on a mission to build a contender from India. We want our team to be where the best builders come together and build something memorable.

George Mallory, the mountaineer that perished trying to scale Mt. Everest said it best, and distils succinctly the raw passion to do something daring. Upon being asked why he wanted to attempt to climb Mt. Everest (a third time), he simply said “Because it’s there”. . Raw, simple, profound.

That’s us, Daring and Daring More.

Head to the Base Camp : https://tech.hotstar.com