An Expert’s Guide on Managing Large Teams at Hypergrowth Companies

As a manager, you may be tempted to give your team members detailed briefs for all projects. While this may speed up execution, your teammates may become overly dependent on you. You’ll have to constantly be in charge, which can be quite tedious and make projects move a lot slower in your absence.

Evgeny advocates for “leading with context instead of leading with control.” Leading with context entails providing just enough details to enable your teammates to figure out the right processes to reach their goals. Training your team to think about the expected outcomes will make them come up with innovative ways to achieve them.

Evgeny recommends creating an atmosphere where employees, managers, adjacent departments, and team members think more about the outcome than the process. He also shared practical examples of leading with context, as opposed to leading with control, which we’ve highlighted below.

• Leading with context when planning projects

If your team needs to plan for the coming quarter, you may choose to be in control by liaising with several people to come up with the plan, then sharing the plan with other team members. But if you want to lead by context, you’ll focus on sharing a mind map of everything there is to be done by the team and describing the expected outcomes for each task to enable the team to come up with the plan themselves using the mind map and outcomes described.

• Leading with context for big projects

When working on big projects, you may be tempted to break the goals into smaller pieces and assign the pieces to different team members. But you can lead with context if you help your team understand the context and expected outcomes, then ask each team member what they can do to make the project successful. This way, you’ll be engaging everyone in the process.

One mistake managers often make is designing processes that team members don’t want to adopt. Employees are more productive if they enjoy working with the processes they receive. As Evgeny puts it, “If you give people a say on how they work, they will enjoy the process and be more engaged.”

Thus, it is advisable to engage your team members in the process selection and design stage. A good way to do this is by telling them the problem and encouraging them to come up with processes for solving it. After the processes have been designed, the team can agree on the one to be adopted.

Companies, teams, and people often fail to question their decisions. This can rub off negatively on projects and make execution slower. But you also don’t want to ignore people’s preferences. You need to consider dissenting views to keep everyone engaged.

A good way to do this is by asking the team members for the reasons behind their choices. You may be able to convince them to join the majority if you understand their concerns.

As a manager, you need to maintain positive relationships with stakeholders. One way to maintain good rapport with your team members and other stakeholders is by being diplomatic.

As a manager or team lead, you may have to reject the stakeholders’ preferences, but this must be done diplomatically to ensure that no team member feels left out and make them willing to proceed with the selected process.

When a company enters the hypergrowth stage, its talent needs change, too. You may find out that you need more senior developers or sales executives to drive growth. Therefore, it’s best to start diversifying your team based on the company’s needs.

If you don’t begin to diversify your team, you won’t be able to handle new problems that may come up. Plus, according to Evgeny, “During hypergrowth, new problems appear faster than you can resolve older problems.”

When diversifying your team, look out for candidates with soft skills, such as strong leadership qualities. Also, consider hiring people who have overseen bigger projects in the past.

According to Evgeny, it may take 3–4 months for talented developers to become fully integrated into their roles, while most people need 8 months to a full year. People get up to speed with tasks quite differently and background differences may also make it difficult for people to adjust to a new environment. Thus, within the first half of the year, focus on integrating new employees properly.

During this stage, encourage the employees to figure things out by themselves and progressively assign more responsibilities to them. This will make them less dependent on you and help them become self-leaders.

People often adopt a parenting approach to managing people. However, this sentiment is wrong because parents are directly responsible for children while children can’t be responsible for themselves until they become adults.

As Evgeny says, “If you treat adults like children, they may become mere executors and feel like they have not been given much responsibility.” Also, they may not fully understand the consequences of some of their actions, which will make it difficult for them to learn from their mistakes.

Avoid shielding your team members from the consequences of their actions and encourage them to admit their failures openly. This will help them become less dependent and grow into self-leaders over time.

Even when you’ve built the right team, it may still be challenging to deliver on projects when you have more tasks on your hands than the team can handle. You may receive several time-bound requests from different clients. In such situations, you’ll need to prioritize which task to attend to urgently.

A good metric for making these decisions is data. For instance, you can prioritize the project from the client bringing in more revenue. This will help you deliver real value to the stakeholders in the end.

As demand for your company’s products or services increases, your team may be unable to carry out all tasks in-house. You should consider outsourcing certain tasks to your business partners.

In deciding what projects to prioritize, Evgeny recommends considering projects that enable exponential growth for the company. For instance, you may decide to build an MVP to reduce time-to-market for certain products.

In Evgeny’s words, “No matter how many years of experience you had as an engineer, the moment you become a manager, you have zero experience.” You’re back to being a newbie—which is both good and bad. According to Evgeny, it’s bad because you don’t know what you’re doing and good because you’ll need to be a bit easier on yourself when you’re struggling. So don’t beat yourself up when you make mistakes.

Being a manager is a huge responsibility. It gives you agency over people’s lives and livelihoods. You may be forced to make difficult decisions that affect people’s overall well-being. Hence, it’s advisable to always be firm, considerate, and diplomatic.

As a new manager, you’ll need all the help you can get to navigate your new role easily. Evgeny recommends finding a good support network of leaders, reading books, or finding a mentor who is ideally a manager that doesn’t belong to your immediate vertical, so that there’s no conflict of interest.