Assistant Category Manager Avilasha Satpathy on problem solving and hustling as a way of life at Meesho
Avilasha Satpathy, Assistant Category Manager (ACM) at Meesho, is the personification of the queen of all trades. She takes the core value of Take Ownership extremely seriously having taken all the categories she has managed in the last year from X to 10X. She also happens to be a polyglot, a proficient pool player and can strum you a tune if you hand her a ukulele.
If you are looking for a Meeshoite who truly seizes every day as it were always Day 0, look no further than Avilasha. This Odiya girl from Kalpakkam has a truly incredible story to share, and it all starts in a small town in Tamil Nadu.
Here’s Avilasha, sharing her incredible journey at Meesho:
Born in Odisha, I moved to Kalpakkam, a small town in Tamil Nadu, along with my parents. My father is a scientist and he empowered my brother and me to follow our dreams from as early as I can remember. He never set a course for either of us to follow and is a huge proponent of individuality.
So I grew up with a concrete idea of who I am and what I wanted to be, and this led me to pursue BTech in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from NIT Trichy. Just as I was finishing my third year there, I got an internship offer that eventually became a full time job offer as a Field Engineer at Schlumberger, but I decided to leave that behind for a startup position instead.
In a startup, you get to take ownership and execute projects and you get to see how you are making a difference, what is the outcome of your efforts and so on. And so, with this intent, I joined the Business Development team of Townscript, a subsidiary of Book My Show. I worked there for three years and when I felt like I had reached the peak of all that I could learn there, I heard about an opening for an ACM at Meesho.
Fixing problems and learning together
I had been keeping a tab on the startup scene and knew of Meesho and the work that the company does, so I submitted an application and got onboard the Meesho rocketship in June, 2019. E-commerce was an industry I had been wanting to explore for a while, and Meesho has been a great place for learning.
Without Meesho I would have not had an idea about all the different operational challenges faced in an e-commerce platform like quality returns, out of stock, understanding demand & supply, and more. Not a day goes by where I am not learning something new at Meesho. Most importantly, the people here are really helpful. At any point of time you can reach out for help and people are willing to help you learn.
One of my favourite things about Meesho is that we all come together to learn, fix problems, and grow as a team. As a startup we are often presented with unpredictable variables, and even if things get shaky in the middle of a problem, we all come together with a solution at the end of the day. We are able to pinpoint the exact problem as well. It is very exciting and keeps me going.
One of the best things about Meesho is the crossfuncional approach to solving problems. As an ACM I am not just working with my team closely, but also with the Product team who helps me in setting up the processes and going live when we run experiments, and also the Ops team who handle dispatch and pickup. So, we are in constant communication with them to ensure that all the returns are in check, the accounts are activated and so on.
Sticking with resellers through thick and thin
I started off my career at Meesho as an ACM for sarees and women’s ethnic wear category. While handling the demand side of sarees, it was important to figure out what is trending, how to make our catalogue better, how can we run segmented banners for different resellers, interact with some of our top suppliers in Jaipur and Salem to understand their concerns and help them grow along with Meesho.
With the ethnic wear category, which I was managing wholly, the biggest challenges were to identify the latest trends in the category and minimize wrong returns. But as a team we did come through, and during my time managing my team, we went from X to 6X.
In February, Coronavirus and the resulting lockdown inspired us to pivot all operations. At the time when lockdown was launched, many of our top supply cities like Jaipur and Surat went under total lockdown. We realised that when the lockdown would be lifted, it would be difficult to get our resellers back on to the platform. So we decided to keep them engaged in a certain way and that could be in the form of a video or a dance or a radio show. The quick turnaround demanded that I be part of the Meesho Radio team.
The intent was to tell our resellers that ‘these are uncertain times but we are all in this together. We should stick together and wait out the storm.’ We would interview some of our top resellers, get them to share their love stories and try to keep them motivated during this difficult period.
Tackling challenges during lockdown
In the first week of April I moved to the Daily Essentials team where I was a part of the demand side again. I handled all the communication that went out to our resellers, from the assortment of catalogs to their placement in banners, and despite the lockdown we even executed a couple of very successful sale events.
When the restrictions on supply was eased I moved to the Soft Furnishings team. It has just been a month here and the functions are extremely different from sarees or women ethnic wear. But I am feeling up for the challenge.
As an ACM you own end-to-end the demand and supply of your category. We basically focus on the operational problems that are arising in the category and try to fix the problems that need to be solved on priority so that it doesn’t take a toll on our orders. One of the ways we ensure this is by following two extremely important core values — Speed Over Perfection and Take Ownership.
In the Category team, we are almost always hustling and there is always a new challenge or a new problem to tackle everyday. Speed Over Perfection helps us in this regard, especially during the sales days. We would not be able to function as optimally as we do if not for this particular value.
Take Ownership, on the other hand, is my favourite value also because basically it gives me complete freedom to experiment and grow. I can set my own processes and set their priorities which are convenient for everyone, but the end-to-end ownership of a project gives me the freedom of doing it my own way. And, this allows me to execute them perfectly.
For the love of pool… and ukulele
While the lockdown has given me many challenges that I have loved tackling in these past few months, what I truly miss is the pool table in the second floor of Meesho office. I have been learning to play pool seriously for two years now and I even have had two coaches.
Despite my hectic schedule, I would find time in the evening to practice pool at work, which I have not been able to because of the ongoing Work From Home situation. Thankfully, my other hobby of playing the ukulele is unaffected. It is also something I picked up two years ago, and being a trained pianist helped me grasp the lessons quickly. Now, playing the ukulele is my favourite pastime.
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