5 lessons from my internship at OYO Hyderabad

Ravi Viswavarapu
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

A STARTUP is always hard, but scaling it is even harder. I’m thankful to have gotten the opportunity to learn how a company makes an uphill climb during my 10-week summer internship at OYO Rooms Hyderabad.

Listen to your customer, they know best

Build something users want” is a famous quote that Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator likes to preach. It was at OYO Rooms where I got to see this motto practiced day in and day out.

OYO truly makes an effort to listen to both its customers and its own employees. I still remember all the surveys I had to send to gather information about our users, all the support tickets we had to answer, feedback and comments the team had to process and analyze with the goal of making sure users have the best hospitality experience.

Small changes can make a big difference

When you’re working in a company that serves thousands of people each day, every single detail is extremely important. One of the early lessons my manager taught me was how not only to double-check my work but also triple-check it. Hand in hand, it’s amazing to see how one small feature, implementation, e-mail or detail can make such a big difference.

Give numbers a chance

Being average at quantitative skills or the biggest fan of my statistics class back in college, I wasn’t really the best in crunching numbers. However, internship showed me the importance of numbers and of always backing up every assumption and idea with numbers.

Whether it was collecting data to validate potential projects or testing the statistical significance of certain features, I got to see how data was used to measure the impact of projects and to make strategic decisions. Suddenly, I had a newfound appreciation of numbers.

Process is extremely important

Throughout my internship, I tried to imbibe as many lessons as I could about how a company gets on its feet. Reviewing the notes I took down in my notebook during meetings, I noted one lesson that kept popping up — process is extremely important.

Whether it was writing reports for the client mentioning the savings, or updating my managers on the status of my work, it was evident how much OYO cared about creating processes to keep things sustainable and scalable.

It’s all about the people

I ended my internship not only developing new skills and learning how a company scales but also becoming best of friends with other co-interns. In over two months spent together, we got to see each other struggle through different challenges, work on real projects and celebrate small and big wins.

We’d stay late in the office, sometimes past 11 p.m. finishing our task and exchanging stories about life. We simply weren’t just co-interns anymore. We were a family trying to make magic happen, and witnessing how OYO has impacted our country’s hospitality industry at an unprecedented rate.

As I headed home on my last day, it became clear to me what the most important thing is in a company’s rise: People.

Special thanks to Abhinav Chintalacheruvu, Vinay Bommala, Dinesh reddy, Yashwanth and my co-interns, the full-time employees for all the lessons, for believing in me, giving me the opportunity to take on real projects and for being ever so supportive throughout my 10-week internship.

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