What I learned about management scaling a fast-growing series B startup

I joined iPrice in the summer of 2016. At the time, the company was a very promising regional affiliate player with an encouraging initial traction and around 1 million monthly users.

We eventually became the leading meta-search ecommerce aggregator in Southeast Asia, growing our user base to over 15 million monthly users, closing two rounds of funding from some of the best venture capitalists in the region, and increasing our headcount to more than 150 employees (with around 30 nationalities).

After such a terrific journey, I left at the end of last year.

During those three years with iPrice’s leadership team, majority of my time was spent finding ways to maximize managerial leverage, increase our organizational output, and above all, create and maintain highly productive teams as we faced rapid growth. In other words, I spent time learning and practicing the art and science of effective management.

Reflecting on my experience, I’ve decided to write down the most important management lessons I have learned during my journey. The hope is to provide some valuable insights to managers and leadership teams in other scaling organizations, especially in the region.

I’ve split the lessons into five different sections: hiring, promoting, communication, relationships, and performance management.

1. Hiring

Front-loading your people investment

It all starts with hiring.

The moment you fully realize it, you should consider making a few fundamental adjustments to your hiring practices.

First, hire more slowly. Never ever compromise quality over speed, even when you think it’s taking too much time, and especially if you are hiring managers (more on that below). The cumulative amount of time you will spend fixing your bad hiring decisions will almost always be an order of magnitude higher than your initial time investment.

Second, invest enough time in writing a truly articulate and inspiring job description (JD). Assuming your employer branding is not on the same level as Google or Go-Jek, you need to put the work to differentiate you from the competition and inspire top applicants.

The best candidates always pay attention to a well-written JD, and most that I have interviewed referred to it as one of the major factors that convinced them to apply. Despite this advantage, however, few companies get the JD right.

Third, add written screening questions to each of your openings for three main reasons:

1. It’s the fastest way to screen out candidates. Therefore, you can minimize time spent on interviews.
2. Again and again, I found the quality of the answers to be among the most correlated factors in determining whether the candidate is truly a top talent.
3. It motivates the best candidates to apply. Instead of becoming a burden that prevents the busiest and most talented candidates to invest time in the application process, it reinforces their interest in your company. You are showing how structured and articulated your hiring process is from the get-go. The best candidates want to work with highly selective companies. They are also given a chance to show their value from the very beginning, limiting human biases, which typically kick in once you interview a candidate face to face.

Beyond these tips, iPrice also started to gradually implement some of the hiring and interviewing processes used by Google, resulting in a substantial improvement in the quality of our hiring.

2. Promoting

3. Communication

4. Relationships

5. Performance management

Bringing it all together