I started my journey at Urban Company in the product business team. We were working on the newly launched product store on the Urban Company consumer app. At the time, we sold electrical, carpentry and plumbing products commonly used by households. These were products like third party branded fans, tables, baby proofing items, etc. It was a great learning opportunity for me where I got a chance to join the project at a very early stage where we were doing merely ~INR 5 Lakh / month in sales.

My key work in this team was implementing the products help centre and then solving for the increasing cancellation rate of the ordered products. We were able to reduce the cancellation rates by 3% after finding that the root cause of cancellations was the out of stock products getting ordered. Along with this, I got to learn how to use Snowflake and Redash for the first time while building dashboards and writing Snowflake queries for the store metrics.

Shift to Fintech

In August 2022, I moved to the Fintech & Payouts team in the Supply vertical at Urban Company. This was a very broad and exciting opportunity for me to work with two teams and lead multiple high impact products.

The service partners being gig workers, generally do not get access to financial benefits that one gets as an employee in an organisation. The purpose of the fintech team was to enable the service partners by providing these financial benefits. On the Fintech side, I led 3 loan products — Kit loans (working capital loans for the service partners), Personal loans and Home loans, together adding to a loan book of ~45 Cr annually disbursed to eligible partners who apply out of a partner base of ~50,000 partners all over India. Along with this, I led an insurance product where we provided accidental and medical insurance to 100% of the active partner base in partnership with Acko General Insurance.

Over my tenure, there were multiple high impact problem statements that I got a chance to work on. We worked on an instant personal loan integration within the service partner app, in partnership with CreditVidya. We started with a pilot in 6 cities and then gradually opened the program for all the partners across 50+ cities in India. Loans and insurance being financial products, there were tight regulations that we had to follow within the user journeys. There were audits conducted by third party companies to ensure all functions are running as per the regulations and all the numbers are intact. I led the resolution of one of these audits and as a result of audit findings, we were able to recover INR 25 Lakhs from Acko General Insurance.

On the Payouts (or Monet) side, I led the Earnings screen on the Urban Company partner app across all 6 operational geographies. Along with this, I also worked on the partner payouts in India, UAE, and Singapore regions.

I ended my tenure in Urban Company on August 2023. During all this work, the most important skills that I worked on were Problem Solving, Data and Tech, Design, writing Snowflake queries, managing external relationships, internal stakeholder management, firefighting and handling crisis. It was a fantastic workplace with a high intensity and high ownership work environment. The after this follows in this blog.