Harshit Madan, General Manager & VP — Selection Growth at Meesho, reveals the three cornerstones of scaling up that everyone in the startup ecosystem needs to know
In a startup like Meesho, where changes are dynamic and growth is fast-paced, leaders and managers must be well equipped to oversee and direct them as well. In the last three years that I have been at Meesho, I have learned three important aspects of leadership that you need to have in order to lead a team in the company:
1. Always be tuned into your users and their needs
2. Lead by example when it comes to the company core values
3. Hire only the best candidates who will help navigate dynamic challenges that appear far too often in a growing startup.
Building the right product for your users
In any startup, the primary focus should be on building the right product for your user. And the only way to do that is by developing a clear understanding of your user’s problem. At Meesho, these are answered by repeating the following steps in a loop:
- Speak to customers (in our case Meesho entrepreneurs) — they are the real CEOs
- Listen to their problems, and come up with plausible solutions
- Build a thesis based on those solutions — first principles
- Iterate quickly — Speed Over Perfection (a core Meesho value)
- Rinse & repeat
At Meesho we encourage all employees to communicate with our entrepreneurs. We even have a Listen or Die programme, the idea of which is to make it a common practice across Meesho to speak to our entrepreneurs and learn from them. The motive is to develop a deep understanding of our user base and staying up to date with their current problems consistently. As our CEO and Co-Founder Vidit Aatrey puts it, “Companies of this age and era really have two options with them — either they listen to their customers (and thrive), or, they wilt away.”
Once we build a thesis and come up with a solution to the problem, there is really no time to waste. At Meesho, we believe in shipping fast because the majority of learning happens when you see users using your product. This roughly translates to Speed Over Perfection and it is our golden rule.
As a startup if you aren’t able to grow fast, you will have to pay a very high opportunity cost, which means a competitor can outpace you to win the market. Even if you have mapped out a great problem, found a plausible solution for it, and created a feasible product to do so in a lucrative market, you could still lose out because you weren’t moving fast enough, and that is why Speed Over Perfection is so important.
But, this Meesho core value could be misinterpreted to mean we might be advocating for substandard products, substandard processes, or substandard teams. In reality, Speed Over Perfection calls for a fine balance between moving fast and building for scale. We give enough thought upfront to optimise for velocity and not speed. In areas where the understanding of a problem or solution is low, we optimise for learning. All the other times we optimise for quality. And we continuously improve our processes to ship quality features at breakneck speed’.
So, it is a loop of continuously communicating with the users, understanding their problems, prioritising and discovering the right problem statements and then finding the right solutions to those problems; and then, repeating the whole process again.
Building the right team
To find the team that would herald this level of success, we needed to hire the right people. Small teams that the company starts with are capable of snatching the low-hanging fruits and creating huge impact, but as we scale, these easy opportunities disappear and the team is left to reach for bigger goals after a certain point of maturity. So, it is important to have teams and team members who are capable of scaling up proportionately with the company and that needs to start on day one.
Your first two hires, especially, have to be exceptional hires!
Over the years, Meesho has developed an exhaustive hiring process that relies heavily on reference checks and referrals, which ensures the quality of people we onboard. Without fail, we hold about three to four rounds of interviews for each role, complete with assignments and conversations that would assess the culture fit of each candidate. This also means that there are many drop-offs and we take longer than most other companies, but we know that the candidates who stick with us till the end of the funnel are truly enthusiastic about the work we do and Meesho.
And, at the end of the day, we are extremely proud of every single Meeshoite because they all play a meaningful role in the organisation’s growth. Moreover, we have so many examples of folks who joined Meesho as analysts and have gone on to become senior managers and associate directors. They grew along with Meesho!
Defining the right work culture from Day 1
As a company we are cognizant of all employees and their personal growth within the company as well. It is part of our culture that has painstakingly and dedicatedly been instilled since the very beginning, by our CEO Vidit Aatrey and CTO Sanjeev Barnwal, who are also the co-founders of Meesho. We have a set of guidelines that help every single Meeshoite take the right call for the business. It is a source of great operating leverage for us.
This focus on culture, in my experience, is unique to Meesho. When I joined the company, we were a team of 50 folks and I remember how even back then Vidit was diligent about holding company-wide events such as Panchayat and All Hands, where he shared business updates and tech developments with all employees. It goes to show the focus we had on our work culture from the very beginning.
Deliberate and conscious improvements to this culture has helped create a workspace at Meesho that encourages all employees to learn, thrive and grow with the company. The most fundamental part of scaling up, if you ask me — problem solving, prioritising or executing, would be impossible without the right team or the right culture. As a result our business has grown at a much faster pace than most others in the same ecospace, which has given us strategic advantage as well.
Throughout my career, I have worked in various companies and even ran my own startup. But, the skills I have garnered at Meesho are profoundly unique. When I was heading the Fulfillment & Experiences org, I was managing a large team of about 180 members. I have never had the opportunity to undertake this level of scaling at such a short amount of time before.
Obviously, I made many mistakes and this again speaks volumes about the ecosystem that Meesho has created, wherein everybody gets a chance to experiment, fail, and learn from those failures. And, that is the best way to learn, in my opinion. At Meesho we all get to learn, grow, and hone our skills.
As told to Mangala Dilip. You can follow Harshit Madan, General Manager & VP — Selection Growth, on LinkedIn, and Twitter.
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