Each day, everyone at Springworks comes into work with a true passion for building products and tools to simplify the lives of hiring and recruiting managers. We are artists, innovators, achievers, and dreamers, with a one-track mind to fine-tune the products that we build on the blockchain, achieving precision. We showcase our team members, their roles, and what a typical day looks like for them through this series of posts. You can check all the posts here
Tony Ghosh joined Springworks as a freelancer in December 2012 and is one of the oldest members of the organization.
He has played various important roles within the organization, like designing, recruiting, finance management, and quality assurance during the initial stages. Now, he is involved in both project and product management for Springworks.
Being the oldest member of the organization, he has some interesting insights to share about Springworks’ growth, both as a company and team members, in Bangalore.
Share the story of your long association with Springworks.
I got introduced to Kartik (CEO of Springworks) by Vinay Agarwal, who is the Director of Engineering at Springworks. This was the time when Springworks was being operated by these amazing guys from their homes.
Initially, I was responsible for Quality Assurance of various projects that we handled and also taking care of the management side of Springworks.
Slowly, driven into serving client projects by doing quality testing, Project and team management made me like my freelance stint even better.
A little later, Kartik asked me if I would like to join them full-time at Bangalore’s office. I said, yes!
We found an office in Bangalore and started hiring. It’s amazing to see how we started off with a team of just three, and now we are a growing team of more than 120 people.
During these years, I got the opportunity to design and manage a product from scratch and it’s overwhelming to see good reviews of the product from many users.
How do you feel about being part of a growing startup from the very beginning?
I feel proud to see how Springworks has been able to get hold of both the B2C and B2B marketplace. Eight years of this wonderful journey has given us great ideas to build efficient products for the HR ecosystem and some amazing clients to work with.
I’m a fan of the ideation process of the product-building here. We came up with such unique products as Trivia and EngageWith just because we wanted to solve challenges associated with being in a remote setting of work.
What keeps you motivated to work each day?
It’s the challenges that I face as a Product Lead. Scrum ceremonies may be consistent, but the challenges associated with various features of the product may change daily or even hourly. I like getting up in the morning for work, not necessarily knowing what to expect.
I could be dealing with a new feature request from the client or a design / UX blocker.
The goal is to ensure that the user experience is clean and friendly without compromising the needs of a requested feature
What are your work challenges & how do you go about solving them?
For one, trying to keep the customer satisfied. Second, since we have a client-base in the US, it is sometimes challenging to understand their market.
To overcome this challenge, it is important to perform good market research and understand the competition within the market.
For every new product feature, we spend a good amount of time understanding the user base, think through the possible ways the feature is going to be useful to the end-user and how the new features are going to integrate/interact with the existing functionalities in the application.
Walk us through a day in the life of Tony!
- Wake up at 9.30 am
- Check Slack & work emails
- Have breakfast
- Team standup at 12:00 pm
- Talk about task priorities
- Have Lunch
- Work on the product roadmap
- Talk to the team at 5 pm
- Design or client call at 7 pm
- Have dinner
- Watch football matches or videos/design related stuff
- Head to sleep
What are your hobbies outside of work?
I really enjoy sketching, reading football blogs and discovering music tracks in my free time. Also, I’ve developed an interest in music production these days. I’ve been learning GarageBand online, which is a good place to start production as a whole.
What is the Springworks team like?
Springworks is a team of hardworking, kind and highly enthusiastic folks.
We are a team of self-driven and self-motivated people, curious about how we can solve things and constantly improve ourselves.
The flexibility in work hours has given us the freedom to work at our preferred time and we as a team make sure that we achieve our deadlines irrespective of the time at which we work.
What advice would you give someone who is in the same line of work?
In terms of Project management:
- Communicate every detail in a very clear and precise way
- Make sure everything is documented
- Develop a healthy relationship with teammates
And, as a Product guy, don’t hesitate to try something new/experiment. Accept your failures, rework until you get it right. Also, before working on a new feature, make sure that you understand the design language of the existing application and define how the new feature is going to interact with existing functionalities during the ideation phase.
