Senior Analyst — Fulfillment & Experience, Anuj Agarwal on how he quantifies impact on Meesho’s number one priority — resellers — with data
Many Meesho resellers who become successful entrepreneurs often do not see the hard work that goes into making their reseller experience seamless as can be. Our engineers, data analysts, designers, and other back end developers come together to ensure that our app continues to be the best platform to enable anyone to start a business and become an entrepreneur, with zero investment.
Anuj Agarwal, Senior Analyst — Fulfillment and Experience — plays a significant part in this back end work, and according to him, this is the first time in his career that Anuj is actually able to quantify the impact he is making. Anuj, whose favourite thing about working with Meesho is the fact that he gets to learn so much from his colleagues, tells us about his love for numbers, the various projects he helped build to increase the business’ cost-efficiency and much more, while speaking about his Life at Meesho.
Let’s hear from Anuj
I joined Meesho in October 2018 as a Business Analyst with the CEO’s office, where my role was very cross-functional. I worked across different projects on the support side, where I would do multiple analytics to get insights regarding multiple teams. Most of these projects directly impact the company’s business and profits.
After working with the CEO’s office till September 2019, I moved to the Fulfillment and Experience team as a Senior Analyst.
Pivot, pivot, pivot
With the current nation-wide lockdown, my plan of action is to do everything I can to increase the sales of the resellers, while also ensuring that those products are of the highest quality. You can have a diverse range of products on the platform and that might get you a lot of users, but if they are low-quality products, the overall experience for the reseller goes down. What we are trying to do currently is to ensure that only the highest quality products are presented in our catalogue. We recently optimised the reseller experience by increasing the variety of products without compromising on the quality.
However, right now, with the lockdown, my priorities have slightly shifted. We have recently launched Meesho Mandi, where customers can buy essentials and groceries in major cities (currently in Bengaluru only), so my focus right now is to customise the app and the products we show for each customer. Apart from that, we are also trying to come up with plans of action for when the lockdown is lifted.
We were in the middle of an experiment in quality and activation as well before the lockdown, so we are currently in a problem-solving space, where we are trying to prioritise how we want to proceed when the lockdown is over. We are crunching some numbers to figure out which solution will give us maximum benefit, and how to prioritise our plans of action accordingly.
Work. Learn. Repeat
My favourite part about working at Meesho is how much I get to learn on the job. And also, I have met a lot of intelligent people across the board in office. I know that everyone has something I can learn from, be it in my professional life or personal. I am still at the beginning stage of my career — after all, Meesho is just my second job — and learning is so important now.
At Meesho, I get the freedom to experiment and even pursue projects as long as I know that it is going to be impactful. There is that freedom which we are all privy to, and that is extremely important to me too.
I used to work at an agri-tech startup based out of Pune before this where I was an assistant manager in the data science department, and in terms of work, it was very different from what I do at Meesho. That job was more about numbers and I crunched them as an individual contributor, while at Meesho it is about analytics as well, and also about thinking, learning and executing. I was more focused on getting insights and working on projects that are just driven by numbers in my old job, but here we interact with coworkers and stakeholders, to figure out the optimal solution.
Introverted as I am, I was never at the front lines at my old job, and I was not part of any projects which had a direct impact on the business, and I certainly do not feel that is the case here, in fact, I can quantify the impact I make here.
Analytically yours
I was born in Jabalpur as the second son to a timber and mining businessman and a homemaker, who are both extremely proud of me. I always had a flair for numbers, and analysing them, so even though I studied metallurgy and material science at IIT Rourke, I did a project with my professor that put into use my analytical and mathematical aptitude.
The project was to create organic solar cells that could be used practically, and my role in the team project was to identify the materials which we could use. It required a lot of data crunching and I loved every minute of it. Apart from this, I was also part of another project wherein we identified the various trends in the stock market.
Impacting from behind the scenes
After I realised that my calling lies in analytics I haven’t looked back, and now I am able to use it to impact the lives of our resellers, and truly live by the Meesho core value — Make Resellers Successful. Even though the reseller might never know who I am or the work I do, the impact of what I do at Meesho would definitely have long term benefits towards making the reseller experience on the app as smooth as possible.
As part of the CEO’s office, I used to interact regularly with resellers and understand their problems and get valuable feedback, and this is something I immensely enjoyed and learnt from those calls. My specific task involved identifying their problems and working towards alleviating them. However, it has been a while since I interacted with them.
Ultimately, everything I do is to make the system a better place for resellers. Every project we take on is to actually ensure that every reseller is getting a good experience. Because my work has a direct impact on this, I also take the core value of Take Ownership very seriously. I own my mistakes and keep persevering to optimise the stakeholders’ experience and always put my best foot forward.
I also am a huge fan of our core value Speed Over Perfection, which is not always easy to incorporate in my work as an analyst. We cannot of course have imperfect data, and yet, we try to do our work as quickly as possible so that speed and perfection can go hand in hand.
After all, the faster we move, the bigger the impact.
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