Learnings from Himanshu Batra

• People are generally good…..just the circumstances are different. So, trust people until they give you a reason not to….trust your wife….trust your kids…trust people in general.  
• To not judge anyone, because everyone has a different journey.
• Life is full of ups and downs, so when we're going through the down phase, we must remind ourselves that the phase isn't going to last forever and good times are bound to come soon.
• Focus on health and wellness, because once that's lost, everything else is immaterial. 
• To work with sincerity, until whatever time that be. Even if you work with someone for just two months, do that with sincerity and zeal.
• To be honest and transparent. Analyze mistakes and rectify them. Don't repeat mistakes.
• To be pro-active and plan things in advance.
• To communicate b/w all channels and over-communicate when necessary. 
• Things should keep moving even in the absence of management, in order to feed the business layer which is the utmost priority at all times. 
• Decisions and arguments based on data to back your points.  
• All decisions /priorities must revolve around impact / metric which must drive growth.  
• To think about efficiency and do things in a more efficient way, whenever possible. 
• To automate, remove dependencies and bottlenecks wherever possible. 
• To take calculated risks & thinking about consequences beforehand ( eg. sending KP to small clients ) 
• Customer-first, always! 
• To train, delegate and forget (read oversee). To partner with responsible people who can take ownership. 
• Take end-to-end responsibility for the things that are assigned to you - going above and beyond to work with your team and to help them execute things.
• Employee motivation will be up and down..you've to figure out ways to keep your employees motivated...eg. Ivjot, Abhishek, my own Ops motivation...
• Post-sales service and sticking to your commitments at all times eg. referral payouts.
• Role of product, PMs.....why they should actively spend time speaking to customers and users.
• Importance of data and data driven decisions.....before engg does something, we see data ...eg projects data (use data for short term decisions and vision/strategy for long term ones)
• Engg will always give you estimates which are inflated....it's your job to have the basic technical know-how to understand which estimates are accurate. 
• Ops are the main driver...they are ALWAYS on charge...you're the heart and soul of the org, driving the company forward. You should have the max energy and motivation within the org at all times. (It's also a pleasure to be connected to everyone and to know at every level what's happening in and out...you'll never be/feel left out in anything)
• Ops should actively collect data points to draw insights and conclusions in order to make the right decisions..especially after each quarter/run 
• Being extremely frugal and saving/preventing cash outflow wherever possible.....also at a personal level...holding money is very important
• Being the CEO/leader or even a manager, you're ALWAYS needed/supposed to be available to your INTERNAL PEOPLE and EXTERNAL CUSTOMERS
• Not everything is possible on emails...especially explaining your POV and the other party clearly understanding it, huge challenge...it works out better f2f. Suggestion for remote teams...meet atleast once/twice a week to be on the same page. 
• Sometimes faster decisions are needed and is key to success....Acadview pivoted within 15 days when the first business model wasn't working out. 
• Community solves a lot of problems....benefits of having a community....all companies should look at this angle.
• In education, the best way to get students motivated/engaged is by introducing competition and gamification (for products) 
• Importance of training....HUGE... soo many types of trainings...internal trainings and external trainings....internal trainings are for those internal roles within the company and external trainings are for those who work with consultants, experts, contractors, freelancers, etc. (trainings like content, product, do's and don't general guidelines)  
• Automation works great when you can follow a strict process... if your process is messed up and/or has a lot of variables then automation can do more harm then good. 
• There are always outlier cases...outlier customers/users and edge cases....etc 
• The entire company should focus on the customer journey...users first and team should spend a considerable amount of time understanding users and their pain points. It creates a solid foundation for all the departments to build the company on. 
• Sometimes you take an action but that action has a lot of other things interconnected so until you have that ability to see 10,000 feet, it's important to consider how those actions might affect other things (eg. engineering changed project data but that affected punctuality marks..)
• If there's no issue, that's a big problem for Ops...it means you're not doing your job properly
• Check for retention and motivation levels of interns, contractors, freelancers, etc eg. tanvi, sarthak , himanshu shankar, etc (hidden motivations, money, same work, etc etc... and inexperienced people leading / managing team can be harmful)
• Importance of feedback in leading....importance of appreciation, etc extremely crucial 
• Hire when it's needed..hire to kill pain not to enjoy your time 
• Keeping everyone in sync eg LPU incident....and managing things at the last moment in times of crisis..eg keeping backups and second options especially when your role is crucial for the company.
• Keeping a track of what needs to be done, what's done..very imp. eg shutting of zoom accounts to save cost? maintaining timelines and keeping a to-do / checklist to see what needs to be done, and brutally following it.
• When things are important, over-communicate and pro-actively take it forward
• Being there for your team...24*7 and your team should be able to rely on you. THIS IS GOLD. if your team can't rely on you and you don't have their back, you are not a LEADER. Period. 
• As a CEO, you are responsible for EVERYTHING. It's the most lonely and brutal job in the world. You're thinking about the business 24*7, 365 days man! 
• Following up, reminding....best people are those who don't have to be followed up or reminded up about. Best teammates are those who remind you about something when you forget (and which are important for the company overall) 
• Sometimes you gotta tackle things diplomatically...with emotional connect, and personal front on the line, eg non-payment of dues for office...if there's no cash in the bank, how do you handle it? How do you save your CEO's ass? Instead of redirecting people to him, what can you say professionally to handle the situation?
• End to End sochna...and End to end ownership lena...for eg. supply is just not bringing the right people, it's figuring out which source works the best? What's the conversion rate? what's the quality of these instructors? Categorization of these instructors? Rating of these ratings? How do we define a quality instructor? 
• FEEDBACK is super important ....for all levels across the company...internally as well as externally for the customers/users. 360 feedback is awesome. Every company should have this. Feedback for offline - time to time, core team should visit and check for the same.
• Keeping both customers happy - college as well as students. In this case, stand for something...you'd be tempted to make both happy because you love revenue, but in the long term you have to take a stand for what your company stands for. It's really hard because you want to maintain the cash flow at the same time.
• Be very objective and rational while taking decisions, keep emotions at bay. Company goals should be a greater priority than personal or relational accomplishments / favorism. 
• No one is responsible to teach you...you're responsible yourself...if you're not learning, you should find ways yourself to learn. learning how to google and how to learn yourslef is the first step. 
• Business and Product should be on the same page always... a sign off from Biz helps because ultimately product's goal is to help Biz but if it ends up hurting Biz then that's a mess 
• question, question, question...challenge, challenge, challenge your CEO, leaders in the company if you don't agree with what he's saying. Understanding his/her POV and where they're coming from is very important...you should understand why a decision is being taken and how it'll impact the Biz 
• DOCUMENTATION: document, document, document everything... especially meetings and discussions. Share the MoM with everyone after the meeting so that everyone is on the same page. Write down the assumptions...update those as your assumptions are proven wrong with data, etc.
• Being able to foresee problems and bottlenecks...you need to be able to see from 10,000 feet. Anything which has to do with cliets/customers is always the first priority. 
• Business layer > all other layers.. everything to do with the BIz layer is always first priority 
• Meetings and discussions are often unproductive and a waste of time/noise to your actual work...always decide on and have a fixed agenda / to-be discussed items beforehand. And always be prepared for these meetings with data points...Hava mein baat mat karo! Stand up meetings are great for this purpose.
• Always plan before...we engineers are always so accustomed to doing things at the last minute but planning really helps us have clarity and a direction. Planning and discussions for goal clarity are important before starting to work. 
• Set the foundation, ask questions to set the foundations first. Once you have the foundations built on basic assumptions and discussions, other things will slowly fall into place and you can solidify the foundation as you move ahead...learn, make mistakes and grow 
• Being the CEO, you should never be involved in each and everything....trust your employees...allow them to make mistakes (but it's hard for them to allow because mistakes directly affect the cash flow and revenue of the biz which is the most imp part of the company)...so allow them to make small mistakes and when you're confident about them, allow them to run the show 
• The CEO should never do sales on the ground, but be actively involved with the team - spending time building the culture and strengthening the team, bringing together around the vision, etc.

Happy Birthday, Himanshu! Thanks for teaching me so much :) :)