Summer 2020 Intern with Razorpay!
I like to think I’m the only intern in Razorpay’s history who joined remotely, worked for 1/3rd of a year, and had a remote farewell as well. I think it’s safe to say, my very first experience of working in a structured org was not “usual”.
I have always heard the cool design team and their culture at Razorpay and even more praises for the Visual Design team from previous interns. Thought I would give it a try. Super excited to join them in office in may, I even finalised my PG near their quirky office 2 months prior!
But fate had other plans and I ended up working from my make-shift living room office back at home. (Honestly, I was just glad they didn’t cancel my internship seeing the unusual times)
From the very first interview, to getting onboarded, to finding my way around “the office”, and to closing up all my open tasks towards the end, my buddy Sampada and the VD team helped me throughout the way.
It was a bit of a learning curve at the beginning, learning about the company, their work culture, putting across your thoughts and ideas, getting feedback, looking for resources, reaching out to different stakeholders, all through Zoom calls, Slack and Email threads. I didn’t have the liberty of just stopping by at someone’s desk to get help or take mini KTs (Knowledge transfers).
But thanks to buddy, the weekly catch up and feedback sessions the design team had, made it a tad bit easier.
The work
Throughout the period of 4 months, I got to work on various tasks that helped me broaden my skills and horizons.
Razorpay has quite a serious, professional brand language across its products and social media. With almost 100k followers on our social media channels, we had never tried to pinpoint who our target audiences are and how they engage with our content. What attracts them? What helps us put across as a user friendly product? How can we add that human touch to our campaigns and tell them we understand the emotions our customers go through? What works for us other than the already laid out visual guidelines of Razorpay? How can we seem inviting and friendly but at the same time seem professional and trustworthy? Because at the end of the day, there is money involved.
I worked closely with the marketing team to create a series of different “experimental” illustration styles and studied the insights about what kind of content and visual styles gain the most traction . Not all of our “buckets” (as we used to call it) worked well, after releasing 3 rounds of first buckets, we realised some of them were not working, we brainstormed and created visuals for newer and more interactive buckets! We had an increase of more than 2x impressions with these buckets!
The most fun I had working on was the Razorpay 2020 series. Razorpay completed it’s 2020 days in June. We created a short animated series celebrating the founders and the team’s journey, through the years! Behind the scenes were chaotic! Gaurav, Isha and I huddled over the weekend, trying to get our visual styles the same across all posts, and Harish with the overwhelming support!
Along with that I got the help of the Visual Design team picking up the Business as Usual tasks too. With a bunch of tasks coming in from the marketing, content, HR teams, the team works like a well oiled machine. If any hiccups, someone or other jumps in to help carry the load!
Learnings
In the midst of this pandemic, and never having actually physically met the peeps in person, it wasn’t the an ideal situation to be in. But here are some of the key points I picked up,
Zoom> Slack. It took me a while to get my inhibition to get rid of the “it could have been a mail” thinking, but calls are always way more helpful. Whenever I hit a roadblock, instead of scheduling a call, I used to ping the person if they can get on a quick call. If they are busy, they’ll let you know.
(And you get to catch up with some bakar and fun tales from the office too!)
Giving timeline to stakeholders. In the beginning I may have given some really ideal timelines for deliverables. Working in a bigger org involved dealing with many stakeholders, taking feedback and reiterating. And they don’t always come instantly. Always plan some time for feedback.
Overall, the team is extremely helpful and included me in everything that happened around. They never once let me feel like a “remote intern”. They were honestly times where I thought “Oh, I didn’t think an intern’s opinion mattered much here”, but it did! :)
I am extremely delighted to have worked with them, and hopefully get to visit them in office soon!
I made a little comic too! Check it out here!
