Leading a 14-member team while still a student

Trophy and certificate of merit at Vividhotsava 2025
Trophy and certificate of merit at Vividhotsava 2025

Originally published at https://pranjulrathour.scult.in/blog/leading-a-14-member-team-as-a-student. That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first.

At SCULT INDIA I led a 14-member cross-functional team — engineering, architecture, UI/UX, deployment and client delivery — while still a BCA student. Nobody teaches this in college, and most of what I know about it I learned by getting it wrong in front of people who were counting on me. Here is what worked, for students who find themselves leading before they feel ready.

Ownership in writing

Every project had one named owner per area, written where everyone could see it. When ownership was implied, work fell between people; when it was written, it got done or someone asked for help. The same rule made TechVerse Enclave's tracks function.

Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour

Weekly demos, not status meetings

Fifteen minutes each Friday: show what runs. Not slides, not percentages — the running thing. Demos surface problems that status updates hide, and they teach a team to ship in small increments. SCULT Studio, our CRM, was built one Friday demo at a time.

Saying no to clients, politely and early

A first-time lead says yes to everything and burns the team. Learning to write "we can do X by the date, or X and Y two weeks later — which matters more?" protected both the team and the relationship. Clients respect a clear trade-off more than an optimistic promise broken.

Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, Kanpur
Pranjul Rathour, GenAI engineer, Kanpur

Mistakes I made

  • Doing the hard tasks myself instead of teaching them. It was faster once and slower forever.
  • Reviewing code at midnight and being short with people. Tired feedback is bad feedback.
  • Under-communicating decisions. People assumed reasons that were worse than the real ones.
  • Not protecting exam weeks on the calendar until someone missed one.

What made it possible

Co-founders who owned what I did not — Saksham Gupta on the business, Raman Shukla on operations — and a mentor, Gaurav Gupta, who had seen these mistakes before. Leadership as a student is not a solo skill; it is knowing who owns the rest.

If you are a student leading a club, a hackathon team or a small company: write ownership down, demo weekly, learn to say no with a trade-off, and find someone who has done it before. I mentor student leads on exactly this; see the invite page.

From my carousels
Three First Prizes, One Loss
Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 1Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 2
Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 3Three First Prizes, One Loss, slide 4
Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour
GenAI engineer, Kanpur · 3x first-prize hackathon winner · campus mentor
I ship production RAG pipelines, fine-tune LLMs and build agentic AI products end to end. I lead engineering at SCULT INDIA for a 14-member team and have mentored 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave.
Open to: GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges.
On stage, at hackathons and on campus
At VSICS, Kanpur
At VSICS, Kanpur
In a packed college auditorium
In a packed college auditorium
Pranjul Rathour at a campus event
Pranjul Rathour at a campus event

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