A Budding Researcher’s Journey Understanding Meesho’s Unique User Base

Meesho has done something few have dared to try — cater to the massive, but untapped, demographic of buyers and sellers from tier II, III + towns. We have over 6 lakh small and macro sellers on our platform. Plus, over 50% of our sellers are new to e-commerce.

Understandably, there is no playbook on how to cater for this demographic. So, we are writing one. How? Through User Research (UR).

Joining Meesho’s UR team this year was my first foray into the field. And these past few months have been nothing short of enlightening. In this blog, I have collated some of the biggest learnings.

What does Meesho’s User Research team do?

UR is a horizontal function spread across all business verticals and contributes at different stages of the product development life cycle. We co-own the problem discovery and definition along with the product teams. At the solutioning stage, we give input on both — product as well as design solutioning and then gauge the effectiveness of the designs through evaluative research.

We’re also involved in cross-org strategic projects which require an in-depth user point of view. This makes UR well-integrated into the product teams, binding it to the proposition of never losing sight of our users! Our team prioritises depth-focused research based on execution, scope relevance and potential business/product impact.

In a nutshell, we provide insights that help product, design and business teams understand the users’ mental models We also identify opportunities and challenges that need to be surfaced for the product from long-term perspectives.

A unique challenge — Solving for Bharat

When I joined Meesho’s UR team, I was most excited by the opportunity to solve for Bharat users across rural and semi-urban regions in India. Starting a journey with a new organisation always comes with mixed feelings of nervousness and excitement.

I come from a service industry background — a field where you work with different clients and projects, but never really get to see the impact you create. I already had an understanding of evaluative research from a cognitive lens, but never got exposed to such in-depth generative research work.

Now being in a product environment, I’m fully immersed in the product and can see my efforts making a difference.

How?

1. Company mantras are aligned to UR goals: Our mantras like “User First” emphasise on understanding our users. And so, there’s never a need to prove the value of research. Besides, our “Problem First” mantra helps align all stakeholders to focus on the problem rather than just engage in validation-driven research.
2. We believe in complete ownership: At Meesho, your designation is not tied to the kind of opportunities you get. “Act Like An Owner” at Meesho is not just a mantra, but is also a practice of owning collaboration with different stakeholders. We “Act Like An Owner” while being the voice of the users and at the same time collaborate closely with product, business and design stakeholders through “pod” ways of working. This helps us contribute to different steps of the product-development lifecycle and have a say in the decision-making process.
3. Accelerated growth path for every researcher: Being part of a research team where you get to interact with researchers across levels, helps you learn from their diverse experiences and backgrounds. As a team, we share knowledge about different research methods, skills, tools and also to know our users more deeply through learnings across projects.
4. Mature research practices: Because we cater to all of Bharat’s users, coming from different backgrounds and levels of exposure, there’s a unique complexity which has been a great learning curve for me so far. Also, communicating and influencing stakeholders as well as generating insights that are actionable have also been contributing factors to my learning curve at Meesho! It’s because of our mature research practices that we’re able to cater to a large demographic with actionable insights.
5. Our research is depth-focused: Before joining Meesho, I had only heard of depth-focused research. But here, I got the chance to experience this! “Depth” in the research context has different meanings in different organisations. At Meesho, there are two parts to this.

First, we go deep into problems, not just from a psychological lens, but also from a sociological and anthropological lens. For example, the way people use an app may not be because of the app itself but because of their offline experiences. Second, when an insight surfaces, there are four levels of “why”s to get to the underlying reasons of the problem.

Being a part of the UR team at Meesho inspires me every day!

I believe that satisfaction at work comes when you really enjoy what you’re doing. For me, solving for Bharat users is not just the responsibility of one individual — or even of one team — but a company-level effort. The focus here for me is to be the best qualitative researcher in the industry.

Seeing my managers align and motivate me towards my career goal, is what makes me more enthusiastic about the kind of work I want to deliver. Apart from focusing on execution, I have also realised the importance of influencing stakeholders to integrate insights into their product-business roadmap.

The kind of support, context-building and exposure I got introduced to over the course of my initial days has helped transform my nervousness into motivation. Within this short span of time, I am confident to lead UR projects in specific product charters!

To know more about how we do what we do, head to meesho.io!

Credits

Guidance 💡

Achyutha Sharma (LinkedIn)

Editing 📝

Hadley D’Souza (LinkedIn)

Creatives 🧑🏻‍🎨

Ved Sarkar (Portfolio, Linkedin)