Teja Gautam
Business leader / Product Manager
Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Async Chats! This letter is all about candid conversations with people like yourself. If you’d like some more context see this letter. Otherwise, let’s get into this.
Teja (te-ja) is a business leader and product manager from Santa Clara, California. He is a hybrid worker that has taken an interest in tech.
Are you a hybrid, in-person, or remote worker? Why?
Hybrid - To be the best at what you do, you need a combination of deep work & collective brainstorming/ideation. Deep work happens best remotely & brainstorming is best done in-person
What are your interests outside of work?
Content creator & blogger
Solopreneur - Big believer in the power of intrapreneurs
Racquet sports - Lawn tennis & badminton
Occasional chef
What are some of your favorite digital or physical tools?
LinkedIn - hands-down the best tool to learn, ideate, publish for professional growth
Figma - Doodling ideas & designs. Something about right brain + left brain coordination that I so love about figma
My Notebook - The joy of penning down thoughts can’t be matched
Do you prefer to work/ communicate asynchronously or synchronously? Why?
Synchronous for sure. To build innovative & enduring products/services, we need focused, short & deep live-interactions for collective brainstorming, fusion & friction. Chiseling great ideas & execution is hard & done best in a group setting.
In your newsletter, Future of Work, Future of You, you mention the next generation workplace. What is the next generation workplace?
Workplace needs to operate in a value-equilibrium
The trio of customers, employees & partners need to co-exist in a value equilibrium. Too often, we come across companies that are leaning towards customers but employees remain extremely disconnected & unhappy. In such cases, companies have chosen to trade-off employee value for customer value. In a value-equilibrium mindset, employees don't give up on their expectations in return for another stakeholder (customer or partner). In fact, companies consciously choose to balance long-term employee interests against short-term business gains i.e. revenue or customers.
Workplace as a vibrant community
Over the past decade, we have seen an ascendance of customer communities to deliver value more upstream in a user lifecycle i.e. to deliver unconditional value (webinars, free trials, discounts) without an expectation. Why not apply the same approach to employees? Til now, employees are looked at as transactional assets that enable value creation but never partake in value consumption. It is time we place employees at the same pedestal as customers. Business value should flow back to employees unhindered & vice versa.
Workplace as a workspace
A product designer needs more creative whitespace & ambient environment for ideation. An analyst needs lots of me time drowned in excel & data for high-speed number crunching. A coder needs bursts of productive time for problem solving & code writing. A sales person needs block of days to do customer meetings. There is no way a singular workplace environment can fit in all needs of today's employees. More importantly, people also have different emotional preferences & capacities to do optimal work. Some of us thrive on people interactions & connectedness to do the best work. Some are more self-driven & individualistic. No matter how fun today's workplaces become, they aren't personalized to individual tastes & preferences. Future workplace should become people’s workspace.
You have done a few pivots in your career — what is your biggest learning during that process?
The need to have a beginner’s mind. You should have the courage to consistently erase the finish line, go back to your mark & make a fresh start. The biggest obstacle to a successful pivot is past baggage of accumulated skills, knowledge, perspectives & results that prevent you from an open mind with new possibilities.
Before your pivot into tech you worked as an assistant to a CEO. During that time you worked with developers and analysts. Was that time of learning through osmosis key to your tech foundation? Why?
Absolutely. I have always taken the approach of outside-in perspective to build domain expertise as it keeps you unbiased in your assessment. Moreover, you come in with a fresh perspective to existing problems & pain points. This is the only upper-hand outsiders have into a new industry that is otherwise littered with subject matter experts. I spoke wth hundreds of techies (employees & leaders) on what it is like to work inside & understand their biggest challenges & accomplishments. In my unique position, I was also privy to boardroom discussions, leadership reviews & office gossip all at the same time. In India, every smart graduate wants to get into tech so you have the benefit of diverse perspectives. You can learn from a marketing, engineering or a commerce degree holder what it means to thrive in the tech sector. Somehow, I felt this was where the puck would be in 10 years & I didn't want to miss the boat. And so I landed in the tech industry with only three skills - Listening, Intuition & Desperation.
If remote work was more mainstream when you were transitioning into tech, would you have still come to Silicon Valley?
I guess it comes down to your job & role. As a developer or designer, you can access all of the amazing opportunities anywhere in today's new remote hybrid work order. For someone like me whose dream is to build a company & business, I would still come to Silicon Valley to fuse with people & culture & absorb the mindset. To me, Silicon Valley is a "mindset" & I will need to be in the thick of it to acquire the same.
What is something few people know about you?
I am a big foodie & dessert lover. I also carry decent vocal chords & can belt out classic Bollywood songs.
Anything new or important you’d like to mention to the readers?
I’d love if they’d visit my newsletter on Substack!
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