There is a question we ask ourselves every time someone joins AppsForBharat.
Not: Can they do the job?
But: When the path is unclear, will they move anyway?
That single question captures something we have come to call High Agency. It is one of the most important values we hire for, promote on, and hold ourselves accountable to. It is also one of the most misunderstood.
This post is our attempt to be honest about what high agency actually means at different stages of a career, why it matters more than ever in a fast-growing startup, and where the line is between healthy ownership and unhealthy over-extension.
Why agency is the startup superpower nobody talks about enough
Startups do not fail because of bad strategy. They fail because the gap between knowing and doing gets too wide.
A 2023 study by First Round Capital found that the companies that scaled fastest shared one common trait: teams where decision-making happened at the problem, not above it.
McKinsey’s research on organizational agility echoes this. Companies where employees at every level felt empowered to act without seeking approvals were 1.5x more likely to hit their growth targets than their peers.
For a company like AppsForBharat, building India’s most-loved spiritual platform with hundreds of thousands of daily active users, this is not an abstract principle. The decisions that move us forward are not made in boardrooms. They are made by the person closest to the problem, in the moment the problem is happening.
“Speed of execution is a strategy. And high-agency people are the engine behind it.”
But here is the part that most frameworks miss: agency does not look the same at every level of a team. What it means for someone in their first job is fundamentally different from what it means for a senior leader. Confusing the two is how organisations either burn out their junior folks or get senior leaders who execute but never think.
The language of agency: it shows up in what you say
Before we get into levels, here is the simplest diagnostic we use internally. High agency has a distinct vocabulary. It sounds like:
| What we say | What we don’t say |
| “Let us solve this.” | “That’s not my problem.” |
| “I’ll take a lead on this.” | “You have to tell me exactly what to do.” |
| “What’s the real impact we want?” | “This is outside my job scope.” |
| “I’ve started exploring options for better clarity.” | “I’m waiting for clarity. I’ll start when it comes.” |
| “Let’s ship fast, fail fast, learn fast.” | “Let’s wait till everything’s perfect.” |
Notice that none of the high-agency phrases are about being reckless. They are about choosing forward motion over passive waiting. The goal is not to act blindly. It is to refuse to use ambiguity as an excuse for inaction.
What high agency looks like at each level
This is where most companies get vague. They preach agency to everyone and then expect it to look identical across roles. It does not.
- Individual contributors: Agency as executionYour job is to move, not wait to be moved.You see a broken process and you flag it with a proposed fix, not just a complaint.You do not wait for a perfect brief before exploring. You start, document your assumptions, and share them.You ask for what you need to unblock yourself. You do not sit quietly and hope someone notices.At AppsForBharat, this might look like: a content associate noticing that devotional content around a specific festival is underperforming and proactively running an A/B test rather than waiting for direction.Here is a real example of what this looks like in practice: a few months ago, one of our backend engineers noticed that our puja booking flow was throwing silent errors during high-traffic festival windows. Nobody had flagged it. No ticket existed. She could have moved on. Instead, she spent two evenings mapping the failure pattern, wrote a fix, and pushed it to staging with a short note to her lead. By the time Shivratri traffic peaked, the flow was stable. Users never felt the friction. Her manager found out after the fact.
- Senior ICs and people managers: Agency as judgmentYour job is not just to execute. It is to decide what is worth executing.You prioritise ruthlessly. You say no to good ideas so great ones can move.You build context for your team so they do not need to ask you for permission on every call.You spot patterns across your domain that no one else is looking at, and you bring a point of view.At AppsForBharat, this might look like: an engineering lead recognising that a feature request is actually a symptom of a deeper infrastructure gap, and making the call to address the root cause rather than ship a patch.
- Leaders: Agency as clarity creationYour job is to make high agency possible for everyone below you.You do not wait for strategy to land from above. You build the context your team needs to make good calls independently.You model the behaviour. Your team will move at the speed they see you move.You own outcomes, not just work streams. When something goes wrong, you are first to ask what you could have done differently.At AppsForBharat, this might look like: a product leader proactively defining success metrics for a new vertical before being asked, so every person on the team knows what winning looks like.
What the research says about agency and performance
High agency is not just a culture value. It has measurable business impact.
- ~70%of employees globally feel disengaged at work, primarily because they feel they have no ownership. (Source: Gallup State of the Global Workplace, 2023)
- ~2.3xhigher revenue growth reported by companies that decentralise decision-making to frontline teams. (Source: McKinsey Organizational Health Index)
- ~40%faster product iteration cycles in startups where engineers feel empowered to flag and fix problems without approval gates. (Source: First Round Capital, State of Startups Report)
- The pattern is clear: the more ownership people feel, the more they contribute. And the more they contribute, the faster the company moves.
- For a platform that serves millions of users navigating their spiritual lives every day, speed and quality of execution are not a luxury. They are the product.
What high agency is not
We want to be direct about this, because we have seen it go wrong.
High agency is not heroism.
It is not about staying up all night or taking on everything alone. Sustainable agency means knowing when to ask for help and doing it early, not after you have been stuck for two weeks.
High agency is not ignoring process.
Moving fast does not mean moving without coordination. High-agency people understand which guardrails exist for good reasons and which ones can be challenged. They challenge the second kind. They respect the first.
High agency is not always having the answer.
Some of the most high-agency moves we have seen at AppsForBharat have been people saying: I do not know yet, but here is how I am going to find out. The orientation toward action matters more than certainty.
What this means if you are thinking about joining us
We are building something that genuinely matters. AppsForBharat serves people in their most intimate, personal moments of connection with faith and spirituality. The stakes are real, and the pace is fast.
When we evaluate candidates, the question we are always really asking is: Will this person find the problems worth solving, and will they drive them to done?
We are not looking for people who wait to be told what to do. We are looking for people who build the map when there is not one.
That means we also hold ourselves to the same standard. We work to give people the context they need, the trust to act, and the safety to fail fast and learn. High agency is a two-way contract.
“We are building India’s most-loved spiritual platform. That takes people who bring the same devotion to their work that our users bring to their practice.”
If this is how you work, or how you want to work, we would love to hear from you.
