Earlier last month, I ended a 23-month-long stint at Stoa. I did two roles – Learning Experience Designer and Founder’s Office Associate. I worked closely with 2/4 of the founders. And it is fair to say that my time at the org was transformative.

It was at Stoa that I came into my own at work. I felt fulfilled with what I got done each week. I took ownership and collaborated with passionate and driven peers. I began to develop (or so I’d like to believe) some style.

Just as I tried to capture what I had learned at Genpact here, I wanted to list what I learned at Stoa. While it is an exercise in vain to squeeze the wholeness of my experience there into a skimmable list of 4 bullet points – one must try! So here it goes –

• Think Forward and Work Backwards. Don’t Always Be Catching Up!

There is always so much to do at an early-stage startup. When I started working at Stoa, I often found myself trying to catch up on deliverables.

In one of my weekly 1:1s with Manoj, he casually mentioned that I should focus more on thinking forward and working backward from the outcome instead of obsessively trying to catch up on original timelines. I think a part of my brain unlocked!

There were many moving parts to delivering week-long learning experiences, and it was easy to miss out on one. This would make me anxious and overwhelmed. But thinking forward about what the future looks like and working backward from there helped me focus on what was most important.

I am grateful to have witnessed much of this early in my career at Stoa—also, s/o to Ashwin’s great Zero to One sprint for this too. I now spin off a PR-FAQ for everything I do.

• Get into the dirty details.

In my first year at Stoa as a learning designer, I’d show up to my 1:1s with Manoj with ideas to do new things for program design and ways to go about them.

He would often respond with super specific and highly operational insights or feedback that would feel tangential. Admittedly, I’d dismiss these in my naivete.

Until a week or two later, when I’d run into a problem implementing what I had proposed. Manoj’s insights would come in handy then.

Turns out, work is about more than having grand ideas. It is more about solving for these dirty details. And working backwards and thinking forward is the only way to prepare for it. Who knew!

• Over-communicate.

Not sure if this was a problem for me at Genpact, but it was particularly evident at Stoa, especially at the start.

The need to overcommunicate comes from increased responsibility. When you’re doing something unimportant, you can do it alone without sharing any updates. However, suppose you own a big piece of what’s important.

In that case, it is your moral responsibility as a good teammate to overcommunicate.

I used to shy away from this at the start of my time in Stoa because I was worried about whether this would make me appear incompetent.

Surely, my bosses didn’t need to know there might be a delay or that I was stuck on some particular piece of the problem – as long as I could catch up with the deadline and send something in.

But now I know the work is greater than I am, and trust and honesty are more important than perceptions.

• Care, really care, and seek deep insights.

Care about your work, who you’re doing it for, and what it means for the world. There’s a whole school of thought around work-life balance, but if you care about something, you don’t think in binaries like that.

Reality is complex. Only with such deep, passionate care about all facets of your work can you even begin to scratch the surface of reality and get to any genuine insight.

At Stoa, I had the pleasure of witnessing such care and being mesmerized by the clarity of thought with which the founders understood the education space.

I remember this one time I went to Aditya with notes from nearly 30 user interviews, summarised into three wordy and complex insight statements. Aditya patiently heard me explaining the specifics of how I arrived at those.

Following that, in a matter of seconds, he weaved all three statements into a much more straightforward, simple one-liner that kept all the nuance while eliminating all the redundancy. It was truly magic!

My best bet is that this was because he had spent so long in the industry with so much care that he didn’t need the jargon to support his understanding. He knew the problems, he knew the users, and he cared about them deeply.

Some of their insights have fundamentally changed my ideas about education, and I am only thankful for it.

Now, to conclude with a conclusion generated with ChatGPT – At Stoa, I learned the essence of forward-thinking and genuine care in the professional realm. I depart with invaluable insights that promise to shape my future endeavors.