Joining remotely at Razorpay
I joined Razorpay in April-2020 when the COVID-19 nightmare had only started to unfurl before us. Here’s a glimpse of how my joining unfolded.
⏪ Before I joined
I had heard great stories around Razorpay’s culture and the office set up. I was excited to blend into the new office while sipping those free latte, but due to nationwide lockdown, everyone stayed home, the office was shut physically and this made me worried about how the journey would look like. We did not have a clear understanding of when the lockdown would go away.
I had doubts regarding whether to join remotely or push the joining date to the later times. I was in touch with my manager and the HR partner to understand if it would be suitable to join amidst the chaos. They shared a clear plan for onboarding and assured me to not worry since they have been onboarding new joiners remotely. All I needed was a laptop and an internet connection. Phew! This was a relief. But wait! I had my personal windows laptop & a patchy internet in my hometown. I had majorly used Macbook to design and was not sure if an old Windows machine would give me a smooth ride at a new place. Delivery of the new MacBook was not possible because the courier services were at a halt. Anyways, I decided to join at the moment and embrace the new experience.
🏁 The joining day
Here comes the joining day, there was a zoom meeting for 2 hours where I was onboarded along with a group of 15 people from other teams like the product, tech, and support. This was pretty quick. I had to fill some documents and watch one deck which gave a brief intro to the cultural values of Razorpay.
At first, I was skeptical, I thought “yeah, this is again some another presentation that every company is bound to share with new employees but within a day I discovered that the team ACTUALLY practices what they preached.
Transparency is one such value that is practiced to the extent that we do not send Direct Messages on Slack but talk on the public channel. I will talk about it later in detail.
By noon, I was assigned a Buddy, Pingal Kakati who is a fellow designer working in the same team. He introduced me to the whole Platform Pod/Team. He was my go-to person for any queries. Then I had 1on1 with Saurabh Soni(my manager) where I got a 100feet view of the overall business strategy and the company vision. After this, I had 1on1 with Harish Simha(Design Head) to check in how things are going and he shared some tips which helped him during his onboarding.
📄 Let’s learn. A lot…
To help me get on board with the whole fintech space and understand the width of Razorpay products, the Razorpay HR team had organized a Knowledge Transfer (KT) session with respective product areas spanning over a period of 2 weeks. It does get overwhelming at the start when you are new to fintech but we were encouraged to ask as many questions as we can. It is like a crash course about the functioning of the respective products which had been built over time. However, we can always approach people for doubts later which resonates with the saying:
“Razorpay grows with Razors.”
The best part was all the sessions were recorded, so if anyone missed those or would like to refresh their memory can binge-watch them later.
🖥 Ramping up with the design
Razorpay is known for its design excellence and I was excited to understand how things function in the design team. I learned that the team follows the Pod structure where each Pod works like a startup in itself following the agile methodology. I got introduced to the design process document and went through some of the design specs for reference. I also discovered that there is an internal Wikipedia which contains all the knowledge base. I used to have daily sync ups with my Buddy to discuss the progress and the blockers(if any). Each sync up was a learning in itself. I learned how Razorpay used Looker, Hotjar, & Google Analytics for tracking UX data.
This felt like joining a design school where you are given the syllabus during the orientation ceremony. I joined in the mid of the week, & I had ample time to ramp up with the curriculum and start with the assignments by next week.
🏄🏼♀️ Getting introduced to a wider audience
Knowing the people whom you will work with help to collaborate smoothly. There is a daily stand-up in the respective Pod where we discuss the tasks & updates. This is attended by the engineering team, product, and design owners. Pingal, my Buddy, introduced me to the engineering team here, and I set-up 1:1 with the respective product owner whom I will be working with.
👁🗨 Public > Private
I learned that transparency is a key value that is practiced and preached at Razorpay. One can easily see what meetings are happening and access all the documentation, discussions. I remember during my interview process in the office, all the meeting rooms had glass walls and not the concrete😅.
Calendars of all the team members are public & you can request the organizer if you want to join a particular meeting which you think might help you. I barged into 3 such meetings and came back with a lot of notes and learnings.
Slack is highly used for communication & we’re encouraged to keep the conversations in the public channels unless it is very private information. In order to remove subjectivity from this, a general rule of thumb is followed that if any conversation can help other people in the org then it should be posted in the public thread. Even if it came out of 1on1 conversations, the effort is taken to make it available in public.
I was literally shocked by this. This meant that I will be in the spotlight for 24x7 & asking all the silly/noob questions in a public forum. But soon I started to see so many benefits of this:
- Slack became knowledge source for me
- A quick slack search provided me relevant information which saved two people’s time if I had to ask this in 1:1.
- In hindsight it helped me track how the decisions were made since all the conversations, arguments were documented in slack threads.
- Personally, it helped me to articulate my thoughts well because anybody could read the slack threads 😁
- More visibility on what is happening elsewhere in the Pod
- Diverse feedback and ideas
💪🏽 Encourage
From the very first day, I was encouraged to not hesitate to post questions on the slack channels or asking them in a public meeting. It doesn’t matter if the questions were silly or useless. This kind of broke my hesitation from asking questions and I realized that many people have the same question/doubt & over the period of time I feel more comfortable in asking questions. Asking questions brings clarity and helps develop a learning mindset. I still remember a discussion where one of the leaders asked:
“Why is nobody except me asking any questions? Either you all understand everything or I am the dumbest person here.”
🙈 Exciting times ahead
Thus I observed that the organization was already functioning at a high productivity level even before the pandemic & this very DNA prevented things from falling apart in tough situations. My onboarding experience was seamless because of the heavy documentation, rich slack threads, daily catchup with Buddy and the engineering team, weekly catch up with my manager.
I received a brand new Macbook delivered to my hometown when the logistics services resumed. Oh! Did I forgot to mention there are bi-weekly Bakar calls where we either play some game or ramble/discuss everything apart from work and unwind!
I would love to hear more people share their thoughts on their journeys.
Many thanks to Kshipra Sharma for providing helpful feedback on the article before publication!
