Parveen Kumar’s Blog

I have been heading the engineering of few products at MIH Web PVt Ltd for last 6 months. Its has been a great experience. Officially I’m employee No. 1 of MIH Bangalore. Life here started a little bit chaotic. I did lot of shuttling between Bangalore and Gurgaon. I still remember going to Divyashree chamber, Stylus, Regus, etc. places with Rajesh and Ruban to decide on office space. Then came hiring. Hiring first few employees is also a challenge. Our success rate was very low initially but we crossed that stage soon. Thanks to my first two team members Tulika and Abhinav who helped me get more great engineers. When we started growing, many times we started focussing on wrong problems. But that got corrected soon. We kept building products. It is very satisfactory to see the outcome of hard work. Some of the key lessons I learned:

1. Architect your product keeping performance, simplicity and streamlining in mind. Scalability is also important but don’t spend too much time on it if it is not needed in 1-2 years.
2. Be Ready to take U-turns. Accept mistakes and correct them early.
3. Be honest with yourself. Don’t convince others on something you don’t believe yourself. If you are capable of convincing others on wrong thing, unknowingly you will start convincing yourself too on wrong things.
4. Get your hands dirty with everything. That is the real fun of working at a startup. That way you can empathize better with others.
5. Don’t focus on solving more problems. Focus on solving right problems.
6. Provide your customer (product folks) what they need not what they ask for.
7. Don’t just bring up problems. Propose solutions also.
8. Keep transparency. Thats solves many problems.
9. Think end-to-end from day one.
10. Avoid 80%-20% trap. Many times we spend 80% of our time in solving problems which are only 20% important.
11. Don’t over-engineer. Most problems have simple solutions. Solve them first. Many times we start solving complex problems and fail in solving simple problems.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.