Product Designer, Aditya Narayan has never met his colleagues, except for virtual stand ups and the occasional Meesho online celebrations. He, like a lot of others who joined companies during the pandemic-induced lockdown, has had to adjust to a new way of working and being productive from home. Aditya feels that even though he might not be physically working together with his colleagues, he has a product work family, albeit a virtual one for now.
In fact, if you ask Aditya, who joined Meesho in March 2020, he would sum up his initial days at Meesho as an exciting, novel, and admittedly challenging rollercoaster ride. Having worked from home throughout his tenure at Meesho so far, Aditya has a unique perspective on how Meeshoites function, and how the company has maintained a culture of dynamic and collaborative growth despite during the pandemic, and we are excited to hear all about it.
Read on to find out more about Aditya’s life at Meesho (from home):
“Collaborating on various projects can get difficult when we are all working from home,” says Aditya, but Meesho has taken those extra steps and measures to ensure that he is able to work efficiently despite never having met his team physically, he says. The onboarding team especially has been making strides in finding innovative ways to make the lockdown joinees hit the ground running.
Onboarding from home
With a detailed introduction to Meesho and our core values, accompanied by a full rundown of the company’s various employee benefits, culminating with the introduction to the respective Single Point Of Contact (SPOC) the HR team at Meesho is leaving no stones unturned to make new employees feel welcome. Once the induction is done, it is up to the respective teams to make their newest additions feel like a part of the work-family. And, according to Aditya, the Product team did a great job of that.
“The entire product team works well in tandem and made me feel welcome from day 1. Despite working from our homes, we were all goal-oriented and committed to working together to make entrepreneurs successful (a Meesho core value). We all supported each other and were always available to help — even during odd hours. Was it difficult? Sure. But, it has been worth it. Knowing that our work is helping impact so many women entrepreneurs across the country, is extremely motivating,” says Aditya.
Over the past nine months, Aditya has had the opportunity to work with some of the best product designers in the industry at Meesho and calls the experience of learning from them an incredibly enriching and enlightening experience. He says, “Meesho is the fourth job in my career, but it is my first time being able to work with industry leaders and I deeply appreciate the opportunity to learn and grow.”
The growth of my dreams
This learning and growth is exactly what he had hoped when he joined the startup at the behest of his friend Aman Arora, who works as an SDE — III (Android) in Meesho’s tech team. “Having worked in the Android team for a couple of years, Aman had been gushing about the work culture here, and the importance given to individual growth. So, when the company launched a dedicated product design team in 2020, I did not hesitate to throw my hat in the ring,” says the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University graduate, adding how his biggest motivation for joining Meesho was the opportunity to work in a brand new product design team that would scale up quickly and in a company that already has a reputation for dynamic growth.
“I deeply appreciate the fact that unlike everywhere else I have worked, Meesho gives equal weightage to both product and design. While I understand that every company has its own priorities when it comes to these two aspects of product design, I personally prefer balancing both and thankfully Meesho and I are aligned to it,” says Aditya, whose favourite project to work on at Meesho has been building a brand new Community, which is a social engagement and discovery construct for Meesho’s entrepreneurs.
Building Community 3.0
Community 3.0 is an upgrade to the existing community. The goal was to combine the features of v1.0 and v2.0. So, I worked on initial wireframes and regularly brainstormed with Lekhya [Mylaravapu; Senior Product Manager — Product] to ensure that this aspiration project would evolve into an interactive platform for our entrepreneurs. So I created a prototype — which came in very handy during group discussions — from the get-go and did multiple revisions to it over two months, before finally creating the version that we were all happy with. The features for Community 3.0 were released recently, and our entrepreneurs seem to be loving it so far.
We wanted to allow users to interact and connect with other users, and allow everyone to share their ideas and stories on the platform. We also wanted Meesho to have a significant presence in the community to help and guide users. Lekhya and I felt truly supported by the rest of our team on this project.
Aditya compares working on Community to getting a crash course on what Meesho is all about. “A lot of my work in the initial days involved reading feedback from entrepreneurs and fully understanding their input from the User Research (UR) team. Other product designers and I even helped formulate some questions that the UR team would ask the entrepreneurs to understand their obstacles better. It helped me understand just how serious Meesho was about listening to its users,” gushes Aditya, revealing he now knows how pertinent entrepreneurs’ inputs are to Meesho’s growth.
”The only way to improve as a product designer at Meesho is to communicate with the entrepreneurs and incorporate their feedback in real time. These interactions also help us understand how much of an impact we are making in their lives and are extremely rewarding,” says Aditya These interactions are also very rewarding because we get to see our work having a direct impact on their lives.
The values proposition
One of the most important lessons Aditya has learnt so far is to imbibe the Meesho core value of Speed Over Perfection. “As far as a designer is concerned, rarely does a project turn out exactly as they hope it would. What we conceptualise and the finished product will have some differences, and it is important to acknowledge this. The idea is to finish the work as quickly as possible so that it can be implemented quickly to have the desired impact,” says Aditya.
Another core value that every product designer must live by according to Aditya is Company>Team>Individual. As an individual designer one is bound to have a certain artistic perspective, he elaborates, adding how it is pertinent to look at what the company requirements are, and what your team’s feedback is, and take a cognizant decision. Aditya guarantees that “Once you start practising these two core values on a day-to-day basis there is really nothing stopping you from thriving at Meesho, especially in the product design team.”
Aditya compares working on Community to getting a crash course on what Meesho is all about. “A lot of my work in the initial days involved reading feedback from entrepreneurs and fully understanding their input from the User Research (UR) team. Other product designers and I even helped formulate some questions that the UR team would ask the entrepreneurs to understand their obstacles better. It helped me understand just how serious Meesho was about listening to its users,” gushes Aditya, revealing he now knows how pertinent entrepreneurs’ inputs are to Meesho’s growth.
”The only way to improve as a product designer at Meesho is to communicate with the entrepreneurs and incorporate their feedback in real time. These interactions also help us understand how much of an impact we are making in their lives and are extremely rewarding,” says Aditya These interactions are also very rewarding because we get to see our work having a direct impact on their lives.
The values proposition
One of the most important lessons Aditya has learnt so far is to imbibe the Meesho core value of Speed Over Perfection. “As far as a designer is concerned, rarely does a project turn out exactly as they hope it would. What we conceptualise and the finished product will have some differences, and it is important to acknowledge this. The idea is to finish the work as quickly as possible so that it can be implemented quickly to have the desired impact,” says Aditya.
Another core value that every product designer must live by according to Aditya is Company>Team>Individual. As an individual designer one is bound to have a certain artistic perspective, he elaborates, adding how it is pertinent to look at what the company requirements are, and what your team’s feedback is, and take a cognizant decision. Aditya guarantees that “Once you start practising these two core values on a day-to-day basis there is really nothing stopping you from thriving at Meesho, especially in the product design team.”
“I have been luckier than most during this pandemic, having joined a great workplace and getting to spend the lockdown with my five adorable cats, unless I am playing video games. But, as much as I am appreciating my lockdown life, I am looking forward to going to the Meesho office and working with my colleagues in the same physical space soon,” muses Aditya.
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