It all began in November 2018, When a team of 9 recruiters have come to campus for summer internship process. Most of the students were geared up for BigBasket is one of the pioneer in the ecommerce space. Bigbasket conducted an interview where different aspects of the past experiences of the candidates were discussed along with the interest and knowledge of the students about the retail industry.
The interview was smooth and subtle where I was asked to give my views and opinions regarding consumer behaviour pattern. I was assigned Category management as my project towards the end of my interview for which I was really interested excited and proud about even till date.
Bigbasket probably has the most compact and meticulous planned summer internship program. It packs in an informative 2-day induction program, where in the trainees are not only briefed about the formal instructions but also we were taken to their world class distribution centre which is an infrastructure acme in the supply chain and distribution management.
We directly reported to the National head of Bigbasket B2b channel, who along with his team has enriched us with insights from topics ranging from the scope of e-commerce in India to even helping us with advanced functionalities of excel.
A typical day at Bigbasket was all with several meetings with the process owners who give us a peek into the current processes being followed and of course,Knowledge sharing sessions, coffee, lunch breaks and not to forget the foosball sessions aswell.
I had the opportunity to work on a dynamic project during my stint with Bigbasket. My project was to study and undertand the sales and distribution of B2b channel and nitty-gritties involved along with suggesting changes to improve the sales and distribution categorically specific to regions. It seemed a little overwhelming at the outset, being the intern only for 8 weeks and getting the project which will be implemented for a year, but a day later I was looking at a Gantt chart that had my internship drilled down to each day. Things move fast at Bigbasket. All the work I did was deeply rooted in research and driven by data. There was no reporting time or a mandatory number of hours that we had to clock at office. In fact, we were given the freedom to work from any place we wanted, at any hour we wanted to.
Bigbasket taught me to look at a problem through a different set of lenses. I learnt to identify the business need, to chart out a detailed action plan and to measure the impact of my actions to the business. I learnt to be through with each step of my action plan – there was no place for half-baked work and the results without the backing of the data. I learnt the art of storyboarding – presenting my project in the form of a fluid story, connecting the dots like a constellation. I learnt impeccable presentation skills and how to field questions with confidence in a room full of leaders. I came out of internship more polished and sophisticated person than I had ever been.