How culture sets us apart

When we had just started out back in 2016, the major responsibilities were being shouldered by only two members — Saurabh and Anirban, the founders of the company. The culture was very different back then with just two people making up for the whole of UrbanPiper. But, traces of culture from almost 5 years ago, like “Quest to learn” and “We can always do better” can still be seen today in all the teams led by those two members who had started UrbanPiper

You don’t create a culture. Culture happens. It’s the by-product of consistent behavior — Jason Fried via Signal v. Noise

Fast-forward to now, the team has grown and changed. The team grew from the meager band of two individuals to a thriving bunch of almost 80 people! We now boast of a tech team, operations & support team, a sales and business development team, finance team and our very own HR team! With the ever-changing online food delivery landscape, our products have also evolved. We’ve learned from our mistakes and evolved our business practices throughout this wonderful journey.

In all these years, our culture has also evolved, and with it our values. At UrbanPiper, our values are a prototype for everything we do.

UrbanPiper Core Values

Values play an important role here, and we work to implement them actively by bringing them into conversations, into the day to day activities we have work and using them as a lens to look through when are searching for solutions. These aren’t just rules to be followed by the book. We came up with these values to serve us as a guide for a healthy and happy workspace which provides its employees with the platform to not only discover their potential but also to grow and evolve with the company.

Here’s a quick look at the values that we have here at UrbanPiper:

Fearless

At UrbanPiper, one never has to think hard about putting forth the smallest of suggestions for the boldest of changes. We at UrbanPiper believe in empowering our employees to be fearless. Fearless in the pursuit of the ideas they believe can be transforming not just for themselves but for UrbanPiper as a whole.

Not only are we fearless in our choices, but also we are also not afraid to be ourselves.

Respect

There’s an innate sense of respect for each other, for our surroundings, for our office space, for each and every component of UrbanPiper that makes us what we are. We operate as no-ego doers, always respectful towards our colleagues’ contribution to UrbanPiper’s growth.

We practice respect and do not attach our personal selves to any of the ideas.

Care

At UrbanPiper, this core value — care sticks out for 3 relationships; Customers, Colleagues, and Workplace.

Care for customers: Though our focus remains solving problems for our clients using tech, we understand that caring for them, by listening to them and empathizing with their problems is an equally important part of the job.

Care for colleagues: If an UrbanPiper employee faces or is having a bad day, UrbanPiper has their back. Right from their teammates to their team leads to HR and even the CXOs. Anyone can reach out to anyone, anytime. People here are always ready to support each other through thick and thin.

Care for the workplace: We believe a lot of care and effort goes into making the workplace less of an institution or factory and more like home, a place a teammate looks forward to coming to, a place where someone feels motivated to create impact inspire others to do the same, every day. The cheerfulness and positive energy of the place need each of us to chip in, however small it may be. People are accountable for their physical surroundings and the physical office space. Right from a small switchboard, to the stationary, to the tables and chairs, the plants we nurture and the walls that hold all of this office space.

The team is only as good as is the bond of trust and help between its members — be there for your customers, colleagues, and workplace.

Own

As an individual and as well as a team, we make the effort to understand the impact of our work and how we go about doing it. Here, people do not wait to be ordered around and then perform those orders, instead, they take initiative on their own, seek the guidance and mentorship of their fellow colleagues and take complete ownership of seeing whatever project they have taken up, to fruition. Peers and seniors can only guide. Not tell. So we take complete ownership of our work and the role we have decided to take on.

Our work, we own it!

Appreciate

There is a good deal of distance to cover and a lot of work for us to do — but we don’t let that be a reason to forget to celebrate every project, all our employees’ good work — right from Uday Bhaiyya, our head chef to each and every member of UrbanPiper’s team. We believe it’s always worthwhile to learn and appreciate the impact someone has had on the team.

A little encouragement will get the team going.

Here’s exactly how we practice our core values

Let’s see how we practice our core values at UrbanPiper across different teams:

Hiring: Ideal time to keep our values in mind

The first round of the interview process that any candidate goes through is focused mainly on assessing their positioning with UrbanPiper values. After we discover that a prospective employee is a value fit, we’ll further focus on their skill-set, but the first priority for us is always value-oriented. So, in the long run, we find people who feel like they truly belong here and feel great about the work that they do.

Sales Team: Values guide us building trust and care for our clients

The company’s core values have helped guide our sales culture as well. The ideas put forward in our values can easily be applied in consulting with clients, lead generation, strategy, building a healthy relationship with clients, and many other places.

One of our core values ‘CARE’ is at the front and center of every role performed here, but more so for the people who perform customer-facing roles. For instance, when a salesperson has to close a deal, we make sure that (s)he is not under the constant pressure of just closing a deal, but feels confident enough to consult the client in the best way possible. The most important part here is “Building Trust and empathizing with the clients.”

Whenever it so happened that our clients wished to voice their issues and opinions, we have always listened to them. We spend time understanding the pain points of our clients and believe in working with them for solving the problems they face. Not only is this living up to our values, but we often get feedback from our clients, that they appreciate our optimism.

Engineering & Product team: Values help us being fearless in achieving a shared product vision

The engineering and product teams are the backbone of UrbanPiper. Among other things, our product team is responsible for implementing strategy, roadmap, and defining features around the products we build while the engineering team is responsible for the actual implementation and execution.

Not only is the engineering team responsible for building what the product team envisions but the engineering team also holds the fort and firefights, manages escalations while resolving issues that may crop up unexpectedly at any given time of the day. With UrbanPiper serving as a middle layer between the aggregators and restaurant management systems — it is how the engineering team cares and owns the complex problems that may arise which has laid the foundation for the trust we have inspired in all the stakeholders involved.

While the product team, on the other hand, has to take into consideration the needs of the various parties involved, right from senior stakeholders within the company to their product’s end-users and make critical decisions regarding the products. However, this can be quite daunting without being fearless. We believe in acknowledging all the perspectives, without shying away from strategic leadership. Conclusively, it helps us to make tough decisions regarding our products while ensuring everybody’s requirements are also met.

Operations: Always determined to own!

While many people tend to wonder what the role of Operations is in a tech company, the way we look at it is simple — Operations is responsible for turning a product into a solution for customers.

People in the Operations team at UrbanPiper get down in the foxhole and take a hands-on approach to problem-solving. Right from the merchant onboarding to post go-live, we own everything.

And by own, we mean everyone is open to learning new things, constantly going to do things that are out of their job description and their comfort zone. This sense of ownership is essential to deliver customer success.

Summing up

Well, this must be sounding great but, what makes this great is not only words. The more important thing is to have the capability to execute them. The truth is, we have a team that can add life to these words. The reason we manage to follow what we believe in is because we know that whatever we do, we can always do better. “Quest to learn” and “we can do it attitude” are the two qualities that always gets us through a cloudy day. Success and Failures are treated alike here.

To add to all of the qualities we acquired, UrbanPiper had its series A funding closed. Additionally, these qualities are in effect now more than they’ve ever been.