Increff Manifesto
- Romil Jain
A company is not just a place where you come to work. It is also a place where you spend the majority of your day time, interact with people and learn about the world. It is a place where you meet diversified people from different backgrounds, regions and experiences. And so, a company operates with both spoken and unspoken rules that guide our way to achieve shared goals. A company in a nutshell is nothing but product, profitability, people, processes and purpose. This document describes our shared goals and how we will work together to achieve them, in these areas
Product - Become the most admired retail tech company in the world
Shared goals
Everything that we see around us - clothes, TV, mobiles, books, furniture, perfumes, toys, cars, gadgets is consumer retail. The world does about $20 trillion dollars of retail sales every year. Such a vast market clearly presents tremendous potential to build world class technologies to enhance the retail and supply chain world. Our mission is to become the most admired retail tech company in the world. In this spirit, we also want to stay ahead of the competitors by having the best products and services in the world.
How to achieve this
Always have an MVP view of the product.
Have a product architecture that that run for next 10 years with minor changes
Focus on features that help clients sell more, rather than features which are incremental optimizations.
Have world class public documentation
Have world class customer success
Hire top talent in the world, who can deliver on above points
Profitability - Create sustainable growth
Shared goals
Many companies try to achieve exponential inorganic growth by burning a lot of money. While there are a few successful examples of this approach, most high cash burning companies collapse either in valuations or under the weight of high debt.
How to achieve
Creating a cash-flow business model
Ensuring we always have 2 years of runway
Don’t spend on unnecessary perks or extravagant work places
Maintain optimal number of people (i.e don't’ under-hire or over-hire)
Work on people and processes in a manner that the revenue per employee keeps increasing.
People - Grow the career of employees, and they in turn will build the company
Shared goals
In general, career means:
“an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress”
In order to build career of employees, our goals are:
To encourage people to work on long term projects and experience full lifecycle of those projects
To give growth to people internally, instead of hiring senior folks from the outside.
To give an well-balanced career plan in terms of compensation and opportunities
In turn we expect employees to take these opportunities and build the company for us.
How to achieve
Hire only the best: We rely on small teams to solve big problems. Thus we want to hire people with a very high set of competencies, like great mathematical aptitude, hunger to grow, clarity of mind. Needless to say, the CV should clearly demonstrate these competencies.
Promote high achievers: High achievers are like a railway locomotive which can pull the entire train on its own. We promote people who have achieved big goals in life by working on them for 2-3 years. An example of a high achiever would be someone
Envisioning, creating and running a product from scratch
Implementing documentation strategy for the entire company
Automating entire internal working of the company
Digitizing the marketing strategy of the company
Have meaningful compensation structure:
Do not give unsustainable salaries to employees. Rather, design compensation packages by taking averages of similar companies for similar roles
Create a well rounded compensation structure, comprising of:
Your base salary
Food benefits
Medical insurance benefits
Sports benefits
Learning benefits
ESOP benefits (given at key milestones achieved by company)
Give increments every 6 months
Processes - Work in an automated way
Shared goals
Often work gets delayed in a company due to:
Time spent in repeated work, and manual errors in repetitive tasks.
Too much discussion between employees and teams
Non clarity of where what are the key objectives to be achieved
How to achieve
Rapidly adopt SaaS tools to automate tasks as much as possible.
Build an assortment of internal dashboards to monitor key aspects of the organization.
Document each an every aspect of the organization
Product roadmaps and architectures
Company governance
Standard Operating Procedures
Purpose - Give meaning to you work
Any company or individual ultimately works to earn money. Having said that, we all spend the majority of our lifetime working. All this time spent must mean much more than just earning money.
Shared goals
Taking pride in your work and having a sense of achievement
Getting things completed
Working in a apolitical culture
Creating work life harmony (as opposed to work life balance) i.e. you can have fun while working, and work while having fun
How to achieve
Taking pride in work
Work on solutions that are of high value to our clients and change the shape of the retail industry
Give your absolute best in the work you are currently doing
Adequate learning and training
Guide people to build long term professional relationships.
Dedicated training period (especially for new joiners)
Encourage people to travel, meet others, make new friends and find great mentors
Special internal training programs on being great managers, leaders and interviewers
Transparent and open culture
You can have an 1:1 with all the seniors members in the company (including co-founders) and dedicated Calender of senior members is blocked for this purpose
Bi-Weekly Chai Pe Charcha (townhall) with Co-Founders
Ownership drive work
Employees take ownership for their deliverables
We encourage having a work life balance and discourage working till late night. But employees are expected to put in more hours when really needed
Being organized: We want our documents, systems and code to be well organized and well documented
Unblocking others
How can we help others finish their work, before finishing our own work
Respecting time: There are various examples of these
Starting/ joining meetings on time.
Leave meetings if you have nothing to contribute. Just inform the organizer and leave..
Let other people know upfront about delays
Promopt responding to emails and other messages
Work hard and party harder
Dedicated team budgets for quarterly parties and sports events.
Switching career paths
Employees are free to move to different roles across INCREFF, provided that
They finish at least 1 year of tenure in current work.
They clear the internal interview process for the desired role .