From moving with speed to taking charge: Meesho’s culture champs on the values they demonstrate everyday

Amrita Bose
Nov 5 · 5 min read
Clockwise: Umesh BM, Navneet Chandra, Venkush Khede and Ekagar Gupta

Who exactly is a culture champion at Meesho? Someone who lives all or most of the 7 Meesho values everyday of their lives and all of his/her decisions at work are driven by these values.

We are back with the second post of the series on Meesho Culture Ambassadors. Read the first post here. As part of our weekly All Hands, managers nominate and talk about team members who truly represent Meesho values and demonstrate them every single day at work.

For September and October’s editions, Harshit Madan, GM & VP of Fulfillment, Reseller Identity and Experience nominated Navneet Chandra, Lead Software Development Engineer (Tech), Ekagar Gupta Product Manager (Product) and Venkush Khede, Senior Manager Operations (Operations) as culture ambassadors for exemplary display of the Meesho value of Company > Team > Individual.

GM & VP of Reseller Scaling, Utkrishta Kumar hailed the entire Category Team as the ultimate culture ambassadors for Meesho. Because the Category team made the Dhamakedaar SBR sale days during the festive season incredibly successful with their efforts. While Malvika Tegta, Head of Community declared Umesh BM, Art Director, Brand & Community as the ultimate culture champ from her team for Taking Ownership and Speed over Perfection.

Here’s what they had to say about our Meesho culture ambassadors.

When teamwork is the dreamwork

The value that I want to talk about today is Company > Team > Individual. While individual achievements cannot be discounted for, in most cases, working as a team is crucial and much more impactful to success.

When it comes to consistently achieving great stuff, then team is super important. Take any big achievement — for instance teams made us land on the moon.

Navneet, Ekagar and Venkush are perfect examples of cross team collaboration and synergy at Meesho. All of them have spent over a year at Meesho and from the early days, they have hustled, spent sleepless nights, and have often lifted each other’s loads. For instance, a year back, when the Quality Assurance team was not in place, Navneet and Ekagar would often double up as QA testers. Ekagar would tag team with Venkush to make operations happen. And Venkush would partner with the tech team that worked with third party vendors to smoothen out processes. Due to this team effort, our logistics costs were brought down significantly and hence we were able to offer discounts to resellers and make them more successful. Their team efforts have resulted in 5X growth and our overall NPS (Net Promoter Score) scores has also tremendously improved — Harshit Madan, GM & VP of Fulfilment, Reseller Identity and Experience.

Moving with speed

The Category Team during a team building exercise

“The entire Category Team is worth mentioning for owning the value — Speed over Perfection which they exhibited during Meesho’s festive season sale time. Speed over Perfection is a value that is closese to our heart at Meesho. The entire category team also resonates with it. This value also signifies a lot of initiatives and experiments we did during the SBR sale days in October, 2019. One might feel that as far as this value is concerned, when you move with speed, there is often a trade off with quality. But speed over perfection is not really an excuse to do shoddy work.

It reminds me of what the late George S Patton, a general in the United States Army, used to say about speed: A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week!

Speed over Perfection is a testament to what the Category Team did during sale time this year. We had set ourselves huge targets especially for app opens during Diwali season. But how were we to achieve this? One of the ideas that the team came up with was gamification. Introducing popular games such as Teen Patti (a favourite at Diwali parties) and Housie on the app were big successes. Despite crunched resources, the team worked tirelessly to execute the idea of gamification and moved with top speed to deliver.

Another feature was the Super Fast Delivery: Dispatch in 24 hours promise issued on the app during sale time. This meant orders had to be delivered on time despite the volume of orders being much higher than regular days due to peak festival season demand. Keeping our promise meant that the Super Fast Delivery strategy worked and was an immense success.

The Category team understood and demonstrated how important it is to move fast and ship things out and to be not afraid of not being perfect.

As long as you have the right intent and you are going at your goal in full speed, things will fall into place. You have to be very agile and know how to course correct — Utkrishta Kumar, VP Business

When you own it!

Umesh BM

The two values that are demonstrated often by Umesh are Speed over Perfection and Taking Ownership. When we started Branding and Community at Meesho, we were a lean team of three. Although as a small team we had limited bandwidth, we still went ahead and plunged into cross team collaborations with team Marketing and also worked on major campaigns such as the Diwali Dubai Wali, where we had to move at top speed and deliver fast. In those days we would end up shooting and editing 4–5 videos a day — which would often be Umesh’s responsibility. And then Mission Rise happened where the output was very high in terms of churning videos apart from travelling during weekends (often back to back) to various parts of the country to meet and greet our resellers. Even under high stress and sometimes unreasonable demands made of him and his team, Umesh gets the job done and at speed. Video is a very high effort medium and to be doing this on time and delivery volume is tough. Umesh is that one guy who doesnt let the machinery stop.

Rallying around his team to put in efforts, getting them on board, and executing project after project, he is that one guy who makes it happens, cross team requests included. He represents ownership in a very strong way.

Want to be a Meesho culture ambassador and help us create 20 million entrepreneurs by 2020? Then apply here. We are hiring!

Life @ Meesho

On a Mission to Create 20M Entrepreneurs by 2020

Amrita Bose

Written by

Life @ Meesho

On a Mission to Create 20M Entrepreneurs by 2020

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