An eventful week at Meesho

This article is a quick sneak peak into an eventful week at Meesho through the eyes of a newly joined product designer.

The 2022 NID placements marked the end of an amazing NID journey , which to a certain extent was ruined by the advent of COVID. But still I learnt and transformed a lot. As my placements came to an end, I was placed in one of India’s best unicorns and growing startups in ecommerce , Meesho.

It has been a month since I joined here and in came Meesho’s quarterly summit in Bangalore. It sounded like a week of meetings and boring conversation, but boy, I was so wrong. A crazy week of collaboration , meeting people and lots of parties. What a week! Offsites, work from office , work from hotel , long cab rides, traffic issues, dancing with leadership. That’s just the whole week in a nutshell.

It all began when I entered Meesho We Work space in Bangalore, I was intimidated by the overwhelming number of people I was getting to interact with after a long pause of more than two years. But, with rather comfortable, friendly and like minded co-workers all around , the transition was pretty much fun. Thus began our short quarterly summit journey.

The summit marked a summary of everything that we were missing at work from home. It had collaborations both cross team and internal, retrospections, leadership engagement, understanding the org, team bonding and so on and so forth.

What makes a team better and efficient ?

The answer to that would be knowing your team in and out. Well this summit was a step in that direction. Meesho giving value to team, mentorship and overall well being helps in developing the culture, the ambience of the workplace , even though it might be remote.

For the first time I saw a CEO dancing and celebrating with his employees. The summit, though it went in a flash was more of a breather from my daily mundane activities. It was more of like a package of entertainment , bonding and learning gelled together in a symphony.

At this quarterly summit I came to learn about our company Mantras, and that they do work efficiently in a business setting and employees actually adhere and excel following these mantras. For the first time I could relate academics and industry on the same scale and define root mantras that worked well for both set of institutions.

Be it in office activities, or post office engagement, there was socializing, dance parties, TT matches , breakfast conversations, sharing perspectives and outings. Knowing your co-workers outside work hours also gives a peak into their thought process, their values and belief systems. Basically it gives you intel on whom would be growing and learning from at this org.

While I am still pretty much new to the org, understanding the structure, values and goals becomes pretty easy when you get to interact with industry leaders, project managers, business executives, designers and tech teams. Living in silos might have been the norm since COVID, but these summits do open our minds to new opportunities and better vision both for personal and career growth. While everything felt nice and interesting , there was the famous Bangalore traffic to to play spoil sport during the whole week.

As a designer, while transitioning from academics to industry I got to learn about what my peers perspectives are, how a business grows and last but not the least, how to enjoy and party. At Meesho people really take party seriously, crowds turned up as much in office as they did in parties, where I encountered a totally different persona of the same person who might even be your serious looking project manager.

The summit ended on a high note and left us with lot of memories to cherish about. The quarterly summit was a good space to start and boost my initial days at Meesho. It gave me a holistic view of working in a fast growing org and decluttered my thought process to a great extent.

So that’s all from my end I will be closing off this article with a statement I came across while watching a documentary named objectified. It states “ Every object tells a story , if you know how to read it ‘’

Similarly, if I were to draw an analogy from the above statement, “ Every work place tells a story if you know what to look at.”

Thank you for reading the article, would really appreciate if you could share your thoughts and views about the same.