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Managing a startup isn't the same as managing a traditional company. Things move faster, roles shift often, and structure can be more of a goal than a reality. What works in a bigger or more stable organization often doesn't apply. People wear many hats, context changes every few weeks, and there's a constant need to adjust. In that environment, knowing how to manage yourself and others becomes less about control and more about adaptability. This article looks at how to stay effective and useful in that kind of setting, even when everything feels a bit chaotic.

One of the biggest traps for any team is confusing progress with movement. It's easy to stay busy, harder to stay focused. As managers, part of our role is to help our teams create value fast enough to learn, but not so fast that we lose direction. This is where the concept of the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, becomes a practical tool for alignment and learning.

Engineering management is one of those roles that looks simple on paper but feels very different once you're in it. At its core, it's about enabling others rather than measuring yourself only by your own output. You're not just writing code or solving problems directly anymore. Instead, you're creating the right environment for your team to do their best work, keeping them aligned, and helping them grow.

Soil moisture modules are a simple and friendly way to check how wet your soil is using a pair of probes and a small control board. They offer two outputs you can use with Arduino: an analog signal that changes depending on how wet the soil is, and a digital signal that flips on or off when the moisture crosses a level you set with the onboard potentiometer. The whole setup is compact, cheap and very popular for plant care projects, garden automation and basic hobby experiments.

The more responsibility you take on, the less your job is about your own output. For engineers who step into management, this can feel unnatural. You're used to solving problems directly, writing code, and moving fast. You may even know the exact way to solve something, and it can feel frustrating to slow down long enough to explain it to someone else. But that's the shift.