Flipkart’s silent warriors are ready for battles of the future
Over the past two years, the baton of leadership at e-commerce giant Flipkart saw a quick change of hands. There were times when access to capital was the biggest constraint, as rival Amazon continued to splurge to march ahead. But
Flipkart remained focused on its core belief and execution capability, the results of which are visible today. The e-commerce major has not only continued to stay ahead in almost every category but global investors are also now more willing to place their bets in Flipkart’s basket.
The credit for this seemingly impossible feat could go to a single man but it is better deserved by the team of top leaders, which have worked relentlessly to make this happen.
Despite ups and downs, Flipkart has created a strong leadership pipeline of 75-80 leaders as the country’s most valuable start-up readies itself for the future. These executives are steering different businesses and categories that are instrumental for retaining its leadership position in the market.
Several have moved up the ranks as the company grew while others have been roped in from global giants Google, Amazon and Microsoft apart from large fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and consulting firms.
Utkarsh B joined Flipkart as a senior technical lead in 2010, when the company was still a bookseller. In his eight years in the company, he has risen to become the principal architect, overseeing the development of the entire technology stack and playing an instrumental role in helping scale it as the company grew.
A conversation with Binny Bansal in 2016, after he became chief executive officer (CEO), led Utkarsh to his latest and most ambitious project so far. ‘Continuous platformisation’, a term that Utkarsh coined, is a complete rethink of how Flipkart’s various technology teams functioned and set a mandate to build scalable solutions rather than scaling solutions as the business outgrew them.
“We cannot do everything by hacking our way around things. We are making long-term bets, so we need to platformise a lot of things. You cannot reshape technological systems in retrospect. You need to continuously platformise them,” says Utkarksh.
Unlike many of his counterparts, Utkarsh likes to work solo, describing himself a floater whom CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy calls upon every time a certain technology team needs help or has come up against a wall.
There are many such examples of senior leaders who grew alongside the company. For example, Anil Goteti, who joined the ecommerce firm in 2012 as a category head, is now heading the marketplace and the eBay India unit as vice-president. Amar Nagaram, vice-president of engineering, joined the company as an engineering manager in 2012. Amitesh Jha joined in 2010 as category head for mobiles and is now heading Ekart.
Among those who have joined from global majors and are leading key businesses include Anand Lakshminarayan, a Microsoft veteran of 15 years who worked at its headquarters in Redmond before joining Flipkart in 2015, where he is heading the big data group as vice-president. Mayur Datar, currently chief data scientist at Flipkart, worked at Google as a research scientist for 12 years before switching to Flipkart in 2015 as principal data scientist.
Despite the top management churn at Flipkart, which saw over 12 senior executives quit in the last two years, a lot of work that was being done by second-level managers has gone on unhindered.
Rishi Vasudev, who joined Flipkart in late 2014 to head the company’s fashion unit, says his work and goals have hardly changed despite having to report to four different people in the last four years.
“I came in at a time when Mukesh (Bansal) came in, so I have seen quite a lot of changes. In these three-and-ahalf years, whatever has happened in my team has been very consistent. Things I thought I would do, have been happening. There have not been too many changes because of which we have been able to build our leadership in the fashion category,” says Vasudev.
Vasudev adds that fashion is the largest category on Flipkart in terms of units sold and despite having grown four times in the last four years, the pace of growth continues. This is in line with one of the company’s mottos, ‘Being audacious’, which Ajay Yadav, vice-president of smartphones and large appliances, says he knows all too well about.
Yadav, who joined in April 2016, says in his categories, 90 per cent of the decisions are not taken by him or the people directly reporting to him, but by key account managers. This distributed model of leadership is present across Flipkart and not only does it free up the top management to look at the bigger picture, but also helps them groom future leaders.