Who am I?

Thanks for visiting my blog. I’m Mark, and I’ve been in leadership roles since 2021.

I’m a department manager of a team of subject matter experts. I joined a startup as one of the first 15 employees after completing my MPharm degree. In less than 3 years at the startup, we completed our pre-seed and seed funding rounds. After the seed funding round, I became the team lead and later, the department manager. Currently I still manage the department, but also lead one of our product PODs.

What’s the story behind the blog?

After being promoted to a team lead, I started putting together a notes document about all the lessons I was learning that would be a good resource for when I have managers that report to me. After a few weeks, I had more than 20 pages of notes. I felt like I should start putting all these notes down somewhere in a more in depth format than some bullet points in a random document. I had been toying with the idea of making some kind of content for a few years, and in November 2024 I finally pulled the trigger.

Why management?

The short answer is that I didn’t know what other options there were for career growth. But now that I’ve had time to see careers grow and change around me, I’m still satisfied with my choice. There’s so many lives we could have lived, but I’m very happy with where this one is headed.

The medium length answer is that there were a few great leaders I saw around me growing up and I was always amazed by how they could make work not suck. During my pharmacy degree, I saw a lot of opportunities to improve life for students, and after a while I just decided to do it myself. When I started working, I told my boss in the first few months that one of my aspirations was to eventually move into a leadership role. I like to think of it as making an Active Commitment to myself. I wanted the opportunity to make work not suck for as many people as I could, and scale my impact.

No, tell me the long version

Ok, it all started when I was 15…