Be it spearheading important user campaigns during the lockdown or designing operations daily, Manager — Operations Design Aayush Sultania loves to solve problems with a first principles approach
Deep Dive and Solve Problems — Digging deep into a problem, breaking it down into smaller tangible goals, and solving for scale.
This is not only one of Meesho’s most demonstrated core values, but also the reason why our employee of the week, Aayush Sultania signed up to become Manager — Operations Design for the Fulfillment and Experiences (F&E) org at Meesho in March 2020. Aayush loves challenging himself; after all, Aayush and his team are solely focused on improving the experience of the users on Meesho’s platform.
Aayush came to the right place, and most Meeshoites will vouch for that. Here, solving problems, rejigging processes for optimisation, and searching for problems within our own systems, are all the norm. For Aayush who moved to Meesho after having worked at ITC for three and a half years following a two-month internship, it was certainly a welcome change.
“Compared to an established corporation, I could see the impact that my friends working in startups were creating. I too, wanted to build processes and create impact at a fast pace. It was incomparable to anything I could imagine doing in a corporate environment. At Meesho, you just get so many problems to solve for,” says Aayush.
Big swings, big hits
A Hindi literature enthusiast who pursued Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, Aayush has proved his theory about taking big swings in startups. Of course, when he joined Meesho, the entire world had just stepped into an unprecedented time. In fact, the day he joined, all of India went into its first lockdown, although Meesho had just enforced work from home two weeks prior to that.
“In my previous workplace, work from home was unheard of, so to start my work at Meesho in this way was a little disconcerting for me,” explains Aayush. adding how his very first project in the company had little to do with his actual designation. “Harshit [Madan; General Manager & VP — Selection Growth], my manager at the time, was particularly cognizant of the fact that the transition would be tough for all us. He gave me smaller tasks in the beginning so that we could understand how operations work on the job.
Aayush started his journey at Meesho with the #SabkiSuraksha campaign, wherein Meesho helped its users earn during the lockdown by commissioning them to make handmade masks for critical on-ground workers. “It was not a very operational role, and was more of a social campaign which I was tasked with leading. It was a whole new experience for me,” says Aayush, adding how day in and day out he got to interact with so many Meesho entrepreneurs. “It brought me closer to Meesho’s global objective at the time which was to Make Entrepreneurs Successful.”
Solving tough problems
Aayush’s role at Meesho is to work on projects in a way that would help increase the efficiency of operations, reduce the cost of the business for suppliers and improve user experience. So once the mask campaign was completed, he started solving for some important challenges for the operations team and the company at large .
“This is what I have always enjoyed — solving tough problems. Whether it was Harshit, Shreyas [Joshi; VP and General Manager — Fulfillment and Experience], or Ravleen [Kaur; VP — Strategy To Execution — Fulfillment and Experience], all my managers over the past year have respected this need of mine,” says Aayush.
One of his most challenging projects, which also makes it the most interesting one for Aayush, was reducing fraudulent transactions on the Meesho app — from both the supplier end and the entrepreneur end.
He explains, “The end goal of this project was to increase the trust and safety of the platform. The reason I am so proud of this project is that my team and I were able to break the problem of fraudulence down to a very granular level by tapping into first principles thinking, an approach Meeshoites love to take, which is to break down any complicated problem into its basic elements and then reassembling them from ground up. Our work on this project is already showing a lot of impact, with the number of fraudulent transactions having gone down significantly while the scale of the platform has gone up.”
Aayush continues, “In the last few months the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for our delivery service has also become twice of what it used to be, because we have pointedly worked on deep diving into issues that a user might face in the delivery of an order, validated these fears, and then solved them. This improved the overall efficiency of the F&E team.”
“The F&E org at Meesho is fully centered on customer satisfaction. While the fulfillment team makes sure that all promises made to the user are met when an order gets delivered, the experience team is focused on the overall journey of the users — both customers and suppliers — on the platform,” says Aayush, adding, “My job is to connect these two orgs together by looking at user experience from a fulfillment perspective. Operations teams are aligned on prioritising the right projects, and we ensure that there are no glitches in the fulfillment process that would have a negative impact on our suppliers.”
Two core Meesho core values have often helped Ayush function optimally at Meesho: Deep Dive and Solve Problems and Take Ownership!
He explains, “I enjoy taking ownership of all the projects I work on. I like being given the independence to work on a project after I have been given a brief on what is expected of me. Managers at Meesho are always available to offer guidance when needed, but otherwise let’s the team members take complete charge of their products, and tackle all challenges on their own. This is what I offer to my teammates as well. As for Deep Dive and Solve Problems, well, we have covered that already.
I love a good challenge and I love breaking it down as much as possible to solve it!”
Being a good manager 101
Aayush has gone from being an individual contributor to become a manager during his one year at Meesho, and his challenges during this transition was “developing people skills” and “ensuring that his team was consistently feeling motivated to perfect their best.”
He elaborates, “Having those small chats in between calls, making sure everyone is fine, being as empathetic as possible, and ensuring that despite working virtually together we develop a team bond, were all important to me. The HR team at Meesho also played a huge hand in this. Even the company’s latest announcement regarding a vaccination drive for its employees and their families was hugely appreciated by my entire team. These things matter a lot, especially during unprecedented times like these, because it shows that the company cares. And, Meesho does.”
Rising up to challenges, always
It is so energising to work with a group of people who are committed to work, as I am, and brainstorm with them. I cannot wait for the whole team to work together in person and not over excel sheets. Although, I have to say, from the work perspective I don’t think anything would change. We are all already working optimally, and I think we would continue to keep rising up to all the challenges no matter where our work station is,” he vouches.
Aayush has seen how Meesho went down to virtually no business during the initial months of the pandemic to rapidly rising and setting records once lockdown restrictions were lifted and we could restart selling non-essentials. We launched new categories and even a new brand called Farmiso where “champions” can resell groceries. We also entered the unicorn club this year with a new round of funding, thanks to SoftBank.
“In the past year, I got a glimpse as to how easy Meesho makes scaling up look,” says Aayush, who is looking forward to more challenges and growth at Meesho whether it’s from the office or his home.
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