Senior Category Manager — Business, Naveenpal Singh, on using a data driven, user-centric approach towards impacting an X to 10X growth at Meesho

Our employee of the week, Amritsar-born, Agra-raised Naveenpal Singh, Senior Category Manager — Business, is the odd one out in his joint family. When he expressed an interest in pursuing an engineering degree, his Punjabi family was admittedly alarmed and encouraged him to rethink his decision. But, thankfully for Meesho, Naveen could not be deterred from his chosen career path, and graduated from IIT Bombay with a Chemical Engineering degree in 2015, becoming the first member in his immediate family to complete a college education.

And yet, Naveen wasn’t one to follow the herd into a typical engineering job. He decided to enter the challenging environs of the startup ecosystem instead. By March 2019, he joined Meesho’s Business org, first as a Program Manager and then excelling as a Category Manager, and eventually taking on his current role as Senior Category Manager.

At Meesho, he has been part of many X-10X projects such as building the largest supply of sarees across regional preferences, spotting opportunity areas in blouses and lehengas and more. According to Naveenpal, one of his greatest achievements at Meesho has been growing the Sarees category to the point where Meesho today has become the largest market share holder for sarees in the country.

Here’s Naveen, telling us more about his accelerated growth journey at Meesho.

I joined Meesho in March 2019, as a program manager. From as early as I can remember, I wanted to work in the startup ecosystem and wanted to focus on management rather than hardcore engineering, let alone chemical engineering. My career started with operational roles at Housing.Com, where I was managing backend operations. Getting my initial learnings in the operations background, I moved on to Truebil.com, a platform for buying and selling pre-owned cars in Mumbai. I helped them expand to their first spoke city in Bangalore and built up two new business verticals for them as well, eventually leading to them selling 300 cars per month from their Bangalore retail outlet.

My first two jobs gave me a pretty good understanding of operations and profit and loss management (P&L management) but the scales of these companies did not give me an understanding of the complexities and challenges that crop up when working on a large scale system. And, I wanted to develop and run a large scale system successfully and that is what made me join Meesho.

I had seen from a distance how fast Meesho is growing and knew that the best of the best in every field works here. I had heard very positive feedback about the leadership team, especially Vidit [Aatrey, Co Founder and CEO].

My reasoning for moving to Meesho has certainly paid off, because it has helped me explore how things work at scale and it has given me the opportunity not only to learn from a great team but also to use that learning to execute key projects. Creating impact on this scale is the most satisfying experience I could ask for.

Impactful projects

One of my proudest career accomplishments has been in making Meesho’s sarees category as successful as it is today. That pivotal move which triggered our exponential growth was understanding the nuanced demands for sarees. We needed to customise different types of sarees according to geographic locations.

Once we deep dived, we also understood that not all regional trends are nationally popular, and vice versa. For example, India’s core hub for sarees, Surat, does sell all the designs and specifications that were trending across the country. Development was required both on the supply and demand side. So, our job was to identify the regional preferences of designs, and then pass them along to our suppliers as well. So, they were also educated on the different types of sarees they were not currently dealing with.

As a Punjabi guy who did not even know the basics of sarees, when I took on this category, facilitating its growth has been challenging and fulfilling.

Apart from sarees, other adjacent categories were not scaled to their full potential until recently. Once it came into my purview, one of the first things I did was spotting opportunity areas — blouses and lehengas — and figuring out how much supply and what kind of supply we needed for those, before finalising where to source those supplies from. We also needed to understand which users would be most likely to buy these products and understand how we could make app navigation easy for them. Within a span of one month, we were able to notice unprecedented growth for this category.

Meesho learnings

I have been a category manager looking after sarees for the better half of my time at Meesho. But looking back, only about 40 percent of my time has been spent on sarees. The remainder of my time has been spent figuring out solutions that would impact the entire company. I have brainstormed to figure out selection gaps on the platform, I have coordinated for Diwali sale, and scaled the essential categories at the time of lockdown. This is because at Meesho, we are ingrained to think Company>Team>Individual (a core value).

At Meesho, the biggest development and learning I have had is in reading data. This is the first company I have worked with, where data is king, and our database is also larger than any of my previous stints. Not knowing how to approach data analysis without any bias was certainly a blindspot I had in the past, and having consciously incorporated that into my skill set, I have seen significant growth in how I approach problem solving.

I have since gone on to develop a personal rule to spend 80 percent of problem solving in problem identification and breaking it down to its core before engaging in execution. This is only possible by relying on and completely trusting data in its rawest form and using a customer-centric approach to solving problems.

We listen to our customers, remove our biases and solve for what they want, rather than what we want to solve for.

Meesho’s O/R team aka Business team gives every individual the space to learn and experiment this way. You have the opportunity to prove your skills, and the more ownership you take, the more responsibilities come your way.

Life outside Meesho

While my work at Meesho enriches my life, there are a few things outside of it that give me a lot of joy too. I am a petrolhead at large and to the extent of having driven 1900 KM to and fro between Agra and Bangalore

But my greatest joy in life is Pablo, my dog. He is now a 4-year-old handsome boy and my constant quarantine companion!

Aastha Shah’s eventful year at Meesho is rife with crash courses on hustling

Milan Partani reveals all about his X to 10X journey from Meesho to Farmiso