Company>Team>Individual is more than just words for Senior Operations Manager Triloknath Mohapatra. It is the core value that drives his work at Meesho
We may know Triloknath Mohapatra, Senior Operations Manager — Fulfillment & Experiences, as the phenomenal speaker who regales us with his wry sense of humour while making presentations during our weekly All Hands. But, did you know that Trilok (as he is popularly known) is also one of the Meesho’s first-ever employees in the Catalog Team?
A multitasking ninja, he handles everything from creating an ecosystem that keeps suppliers happy to maintaining a work environment that enables his team members to grow. He has been a huge part of the company’s monumental journey and has contributed heavily to it as well.
Learn all about this Odia boy’s journey with Meesho here:
I joined Meesho in November 2018 as a manager in the Catalog team in the Catalog team, which at the time was a mere 20-member team. From then on, our growth to a 180-member strong team and my own growth to Senior Operations Manager in the Fulfillment&Experience org has been quite an eventful one. During this period, my team and I have also built important processes such as price benchmarking, Quality Control, and more.
Perfecting our performance
Over the last year and eight months, my team and I have worked closely with the Category and Product teams to develop the template format for the catalogs — which has helped cut short the processing time for suppliers infinitely — to replace the previously employed manual input format. During this period, I have also helped renew the productivity metrics as well, and am working tirelessly to increase and improve automation within my team.
Currently, my primary focus is on supplier adoption, which is basically figuring out ways to increase the number of suppliers uploading their products on the catalog template instead of the old manual. I also focus on the key operational metrics of our team, understanding the productivity, keeping a tab on all the new uploads in the catalog, training vendors across India working on catalog operations and helping reduce their error percentage. Another priority I have at work is managing all the escalations we receive from the Supplier team and the CX team, and provide a resolution to the problems faced by our suppliers, and improve the process to avoid these problems in the future.
I have worked in startups throughout my life. I joined SpoonJoy in 2015 as a Senior Operations Executive after completing my BTech in Computer Science from BPUT University in Odisha. After a year there, I joined Tracxn as a Data Ops Manager and stayed on for three years before finding my way to Meesho. I learned quite a bit in my role there especially when it came to automation, designing processes, properly understanding Excel, Google sheets, and Appscript, etc. However, it was at Meesho that I learned how to manage a large team of over 100 people.
Being part of a bigger picture
I joined a very raw team and moulded it into an optimised, purposeful one, and it was only possible because the Meesho leadership saw my potential and gave me the green light to run with my vision. Kapil Babel (Sr Program Manager — International), Rahil Vijay (Associate Director — O/R), and Utkrishta Kumar (General Manager & VP — O/R) trusted me willingly to handle a large team, and eventually, Harshit Madan (General Manager & VP — F&E) instilled in me the sense of ownership to make efficiently independent decisions for the team in my own way.
In none of my previous roles did I have a full understanding of the larger vision of the company But in Meesho, I feel like I am part of the bigger picture, beyond my job description, and I am confident about what my managers expect out of me and my team members. The management is extremely transparent with the employees and everyone has a pretty good understanding of how to go about their daily work days and how to make day-to-day decisions because of the Meesho core values we swear by.
Speed over Perfection, for example, is one of the most important core values for us in the Catalog team, and a lot of the work that we do is dictated by it. The Catalog team’s job is pretty dynamic and we cannot delay any of our work in the pursuit of making absolutely perfect, because our daily productivity is optimised through the number of processes we do, and we are often acting on well-trained instincts to provide exemplary output.
Putting Meesho first
The other values that drive all of us Meeshoites are Making Entrepreneurs Successful and Company>Team>Individual. These tell us what our company stands for, and how our work is going to contribute to that, and that is more or less our driving force. For my team, I am the representative of the management, trying to get my team to function in a way that positively impacts our company’s growth, while on the other side of the same coin, I try to support them, encourage them, and facilitate their growth in the company. It is important to me that my team members are content at work.
I am a great proponent of work-life balance and the way I carve that time for myself is through badminton, cricket and many other games. I love the sport and have won a few championships in Bangalore South and have played in the Odisha Premier League as well.
I started taking part in sports during my school days in Odisha, where I was raised by my homemaker mother and my father runs his own workshop — which is not doing particularly great currently. I have two brothers, both of whom also work in the private sector, and we are all offering moral and financial support to our parents during this difficult lockdown period.
Lockdown has been a difficult period for me because I miss going to the office and interacting with my teammates. However, it did provide me with the opportunity to move back home and work from here as I support my parents who are battling with some health issues. I am impatiently waiting for everything to go back to normal, but meanwhile, I am happy to do the work that I enjoy and appreciate.
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