10 Ingredients of Swiggy Product Sauce

This is me.

I had a couple of months before starting my MBA at Wharton.

While I was a data analytics fanatic, the emerging field of product management intrigued me.

To get a feel of the real thing, I jumped to pursue an internship with the Product Team at Swiggy, India’s largest and fastest growing food-tech startup clocking millions of orders a month.

Here are 10 things that I experienced and that YOU are bound to experience if you were to work at Swiggy -

1. You will be able to drive real impact.

Often internships, especially in India, tend to get boring as executives offload their administrative tasks to interns. Thankfully, it wasn’t this way at Swiggy. Among many key initiatives, I was in-charge of driving the Customer Segmentation project – company’s big bet on how future experiences with Swiggy will be differentiated and personalized.  The segmentation service was a cross-function Customer Analytics initiative and I was given freedom to experiment and implement. An open, expansive company-wide platform to present the results was provided to me.

My impact was validated when ‘Swiggy Champions’ (crème customers of Swiggy that I was able to define) became de-facto language of referring to Swiggy’s best customers.

Not many companies foster an environment where interns can leave a legacy. Swiggy is different.

2. The culture is flat. When I say flat, it cannot get flatter than this.

Anyone can go upto anyone and ask anything. Anyone from any team and any seniority level can challenge your ideas. In this process, you will develop new perspectives and appreciate diverse point of views. Soon, unequivocally, you will be able to argue both sides of the argument and will be able to factor known unknowns while building strategies.

3. Everything is an outcome of prioritization. Your will have a pragmatic pursuit aligned with the company’s vision.

Every business has limited resources. One key responsibility of Product Managers is to prioritize. A ‘nice-to-have’ product feature but impacting limited customers is deprioritized over a simple feature impacting tens of thousands. You will see people master the skill of prioritization. Real, practical and impactful pursuit is incredibly valued – all while working determinedly towards the company’s vision.

4. Most business problems are mathematical functions for Product Managers– they are crazily good with ‘numbers’.

You will see Product Managers being great multi-taskmasters for the firm. Swiggy invests time and effort in driving on-boarding sessions for different business functions. For Example, a PM from App Search & Discovery (S&D) would be exposed to marketing operations and would know marketing ball park business metrics. This helps the PM build holistic strategies for S&D knowing well the impact it would have on all connected and subsequently inter-connected business functions. It also sets the ecosystem up for success as decisions are not theoretical and isolated, they are practical and informed.You would hear something like this from an S&D PM –

‘If we run a cart abandonment marketing campaign and hit a 10% click-thru-rate, we can expect 60% customers to checkout in turn improving our orders by 2%'

And I thought I was the data person.

5. All Product Managers are mini-CEOs of their products. They have a Mission, Vision and a Roadmap. Quite literally.

As a Product Manager, you will be expected to have a deep insight into your product and have a command on it like it were your territory. You will be responsible and accountable and will be consulted by other business stakeholders whose actions impact your turf. You will have to be agile yet opinionated. You will have to sometimes be data driven, sometime data led and sometimes take gut calls. Seeing your turf transform into a critical business function/ product will be gratifying as well as rewarding.

6. You will meet extremely sharp people. They would party equally hard.

There is this thing with certain kind of smart people – they are also crazy party animals. The probability that you will find such people in the product team is very high. I saw mid-week parties, weekend parties and Monday parties. It was not surprising to me when Swiggy came on top of ‘LinkedIn’s Best Places to work for’ list. People genuinely have fun at and outside work.

7. People are so passionate that you may fear they’ll kill each other in brainstorming sessions. In the end however, more often than not, the one with ‘Data’ triumphs.

Every person in product reeks a sense of passion and purpose. People tirelessly work towards a common goal – ‘Changing the way India eats’. When the vision is so grand, people ought to have strong points of views. But they are open to being proved wrong. More often than not though, the strongest person in the room is the person with the data backed hypotheses.

8. You will love the ‘no-frills-attached-leadership’; the real-life solution oriented X-men

The leadership is filled with grounded, solution-seeking-ninjas who are charting the course for a very successful and steep trajectory. The recent $80 million funding validates this takeaway. Don’t be surprised if you see the CEO patiently waiting in the canteen queue for food without any sense of entitlement.

9. The interview process will be difficult but brilliant and far from traditional.

The ratio of interviewed to hired of the product team stands at 40:1.

You will have multiple rounds and extended conversations. Be ready with your take on the 3-way marketplace, what you want to do short term with your product and how you think it will scale. You should have a vision for your product and how it will align with the company’s mission. Your ability to think on your feet, adapt like a fly-wheel and the cultural fit to the organization will be given much weightage. In the VP’s (Product) words – “You should have a forest and a tree view i.e. be able to zoom-out and zoom-into the picture effortlessly”.

However, don’t think that you need to be a ‘know-all’ when you join. You will be mentored well in areas that might be gaps of improvement. Swiggy also pays special attention to mentorship and  training young high-performers who have the potential to become awesome future product managers.

10. Learnings of many months will be compressed into experiences over some days. Working at Swiggy surely means having a very steep learning curve.

Sheryl Sandberg once said - “If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on”.

Swiggy is surely a rocket-ship. And there are still many seats. While I am leaving for an MBA, I would recommend this place to hustlers who want to take off.

*The views in the article are solely of the author’s.