Building the path towards true Tech Leadership: 6 stages of growth

At Bright we build Tech Leaders. And eventually, Tech Leaders who will become Tech Entrepreneurs.

We believe that Indian entrepreneurship over the last decade has moved forward but without emphasis on tech and product leadership. Entrepreneurs focus on sales or business. Product-focused companies are too few in India, which ultimately restricts the development of our ecosystem and our economy.

At Bright, we aspire to be a company that is consistently led by Tech Leaders. All four Founders at Bright have backgrounds as computer scientists, data scientists or tech-focused entrepreneurs.

This emphasis on tech-first is reflected in how we operate every day. We expect future Product and General Managers at Bright to also come from our Engineering and Data Science teams.

Our deep ambition is to have the fastest environment for the growth of Tech leaders in India.

So a journey to leadership that might take 20 years in a typical 1990s Indian tech company, we have designed to be a journey of 36 months at Bright.

We see a person’s growth in 6 stages of development:

• ‍‍‍The Task Doer (2-3 months)
• ‍The Task Owner (3-5 months)
• The Tech Project Owner (6-12 months)
• ‍The Tech Product Owner (12-18 months)
• ‍‍The Tech Leader (18-36 months)
• The Tech Entrepreneur (36+ months)
  
  

We have defined 11 skill areas that mature and expand, as you move through these 6 stages:

1. ‍‍‍Writing effective code
2. ‍Ensuring code quality
3. Architecting and system design
4. ‍Developing tech expertise
5. ‍‍Ownership and initiative
6. Planning and Project management
7. Communication and stakeholders
8. Teamwork, coaching, and mentoring
9. Problem-solving
10. Business context and community learning
11. Tech vision and evangelism
    

You can see our full and detailed framework in the development and training of every team member here.

We have set ourselves a very high bar as a company, and we want nothing less than to move the standard forward in our ecosystem in Bangalore.

We expect our understanding of the nuance and fine-print of this journey must get stronger. To that end, comments, contributions and debate are welcome to enrich this framework.