Understanding Meesho’s 4H framework

We’ve grown 100x in 3 years. Here’s how we overcame our growing pains.

BHAG!

Tell that to someone on the street in Jabalpur, and they’ll probably run away from you.

Tell that to someone in Meesho, and they’ll have a long, informative discussion with you over a cup of coffee 🙇

An abbreviation for Big, Hairy, Ambitious Goal, BHAG was coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras to decide on long term goals and align resources.

But chasing BHAGs and 10x projects does have a downside. Most of our talent is dedicated towards such big ticket projects, and leaves little room for hygiene checks and experimentation.

This is where our 4H framework comes in. It helps us allocate tech talent for each project in a proportionate manner that keeps our machine chugging along effortlessly at a 10x pace.

Let’s dive in 🤿

Choppy waters 🌊

As with any startup, we fire fought our way to a unicorn valuation. Personnel for each project was allocated based on an immediate need, rather than a long-term vision for the company.

For example, hygiene checks, especially on the engineering backend, were deprioritised and in some cases, done away with. We only paid attention to such issues when they would prove to be a scale bottleneck.

However, this was clearly unsustainable. It all boiled down to two roadblocks:

Huge underinvestment in hygiene areas 🧹

Let’s face the facts: hygiene checkups are boring. Maintenance of existing features isn’t exactly thrilling, especially when compared to the rollout of new products, or building one from scratch.

However, they are necessary to execute newer improvements. Without maintenance, innovative projects get more difficult, since the building blocks are shaky.

Without a well-maintained framework, development times are longer. This leads to a clunky UX, which is a strict no-no.

Hygiene checks are critical to sustain hypergrowth, and thus, critical to Meesho.

Little room for experimentation 🔬

The tech talent at Meesho regularly comes up with ideas to better the experience of our users. These ideas need to be worked on a little to test their functionality and viability.

With almost all tech talent tied up in scaling BHAGs or working on maintenance of existing features, there was no room for experimentation.

Some of these bottom-up ideas have the potential to have a 10x impact — but never saw the light of day 😔

The last straw 🤕

We’ve all dealt with a leaky faucet at some point in our lives. We never really fix it in the first go. There’s always some jugaad to offset it from bothering us.

That is until the damn pipe explodes 💥

We had our own burst pipe during one of our biggest sale days ever. During Diwali in 2019, our app crashed, and we were offline for hours.

The reason? Lack of hygiene checks.

Such an outage was unacceptable. We had to put an end to this chaos.

No borders, just horizons 🌅

We took a step or two back, and went to the drawing board.

The issues were evident — now, we needed to find a solution.

After some benchmarking, we had our solution ready. Say hello to our 4H framework!

Ideally, the personnel management for the 4H project would be as follows:

• ~40% for H1 (10x)
• ~10% for H1 (E)
• 10% for H2
• 10% for H3
• ~30% for H4

However, this is not a rigid structure. It will change on a quarterly basis, depending on the business context.

For example, the July-August-September quarter is crucial to ramping up scale for the upcoming festive season, so more people are assigned to prepare our platform for huge surges in traffic.

Implementing our framework 🧑‍🔧

Our horizons come with a new currency: story points.

While planning for any new project, we need to plan the amount of hours required. This is necessary across our verticals: product, design, engineering, data science, UR.

We calculate our story points, and accordingly, we have an optimum allocation of personnel for any project, irrespective of scale.

Smooth sailing ⛵️

Honestly? Everyone’s much happier with their current horizons 😉

• Bandwidth is well-defined for engineers. Sprints can be planned accordingly, and not ever project is “URGENT” for our coders
• Product folks have some breathing room to take a punt on projects, and have enough time to develop a proof of concept
• Leadership can ascertain timelines in terms of short and long term priorities

Apart from reducing everyone’s stress, we’re now working to understand the tremendous impact the 4H framework has brought across the org.

A lot of this is anecdotal and self-evident, but as an org that prides itself on being data-driven, this will be our next target: measure and better our 4H to have happier Meeshoites across the board.

Thanks to Kirti Varun and Anant Gupta for being the architects of this framework!

Found this interesting? Want to know more? Leave a comment, we’ll get back 😄

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