Asha Ashok, Meesho’s first woman tech employee, on how solving tech challenges & taking ownership at Meesho has been truly empowering for her
By: Amrita Bose
Tags: Startup, Culture, Women In Tech, Software Development

Asha Ashok, Meesho’s first woman tech employee, on how solving tech challenges & taking ownership at Meesho has been truly empowering for her Amrita Bose Follow Dec 13, 2019 · 6 min read

At Meesho, 35 percent of our workforce comprise women and we are constantly working to change this statistic and build more equity in diversity and gender representation at the workplace. As Meesho is on a constant mission to empower women across India to start their own businesses with zero investment, and help them achieve not only financial freedom but also a sense of identity, we bring the same kind of ethos to our workforce and are strong believers of gender equality at the workplace.

According to research conducted by AnitaB.org, a global, California based non profit (founded by computer scientists: Anita Borg and Telle Whitney) that works towards advancing opportunities for women in the field of technology, women IT employees in India currently comprise 34 per cent of the workforce. Compared to the US and Europe, women’s tech equity ratio in india is ahead of these countries. However the ratio is still much more skewed towards male tech employees to female in India.

Asha Ashok was the first ever Senior Software Engineer to join Meesho’s Tech team in January 2019. Since then our women workforce across Product, DevOps and QA has been steadily growing — surely a sign of the times. Here’s Asha talking about her journey at Meesho, how she learnt to Take Ownership (a core Meesho value) here, and what it means for her to be a woman in tech.

From Kochi to Benaras

I grew up in Kochi and never really had to step out of Kerala till I completed my 12th in sciences. Once I got admission at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi to pursue a BTech in Electrical Engineering, I actually travelled out of Kerala for the first time and that too all the way to Varanasi. Apart from studying my engineering textbooks, I also picked up Hindi, because for the next four years I had to survive there. I am proud to say that not only did I become fluent in Hindi but also managed to acquire a slight UP accent. At Meesho, you will most likely find me conversing in Hindi!

Once I graduated from IIT (BHU) in 2016, I joined Oracle as part of a direct campus placement and spent two and a half years there. In Oracle, I was part of a team that was partly working in India and partly in the US, so it wasn’t really like being part of the bigger picture. At Oracle, I got a good exposure to various technologies, but somewhere along the way I began to feel a bit stagnated. I wanted a new challenge and hence began my search for the next opportunity that would let me do so.

Being the first

While I was hesitant to join a startup after coming from an organised corporate set up, Meesho welcomed me eagerly on board when I applied. I joined Meesho in January 2019 as a Senior Software Engineer, at a time when it was just beginning to scale aggressively, and the Tech team was also starting to expand.

I was the first woman tech employee at Meesho. And today, I am happy to say that there are many more who have joined between Product and Tech teams (in DevOps and QA), and we are 16 of us and counting!

If you ask me, from school to college and work, I have always been in groups where the ratio of women to men has been lean. Being a science student and then engineering means, your classmates are most likely to be men. Techies are infamous for not being very social, but I actually love interacting with people. It took me a while to break the ice with my team at Meesho — because there is nothing that a round of beer after work cannot solve!

As soon as I joined Meesho, our Director of Engineering Samir Ranjan handed me my first project. I had to fly solo from day one by taking ownership of my first project — related to payments. Though it took me a while to understand the Meesho tech, taking up that first big project got me accelerating. Being able to successfully execute this project along with my colleagues was a big confidence booster for me. This was when I felt like I could now easily fit into the startup way of life!

Currently I am part of the Payments team and whatever actions we take as part of this team, our biggest goal is to make our resellers lives easier, better, and to make them even more successful (Make Resellers Successful is a value all of us live by at Meesho). For instance, when our resellers get paid out their earnings by Meesho, we wanted them to get to know when they would receive the payment by sending them a notification. If you look at it, it just a small action, but even that small step can make their lives easier, knowing that the money is now in their account and not having to manually check it.

Building this would be a minor tech feature, but it would be still making a small but meaningful impact in the resellers’ lives. Whatever we do as a team, the impact on a reseller’s life has to be huge. And not only our end users, but also even for Meesho if we can make processes easier by, say automating the payments flow from our end, then we are making the finance team’s work easier (Putting Company>Team>Individual is another Meesho value).

Among several small and big projects — I have contributed towards releasing features for the suppliers side of the business, and have ensured that these features have also shipped out fast. At Meesho, we believe in Speed over Perfection (a Meesho value). You can keep perfecting a feature, but at some point you have to release the feature, let it go, see the impact and then it can come back to you for further tweaking as required. Because otherwise you won’t know whether something is working or not.

We develop features quickly, ship them out fast but at the same time keep monitoring the metrics and impact of it.

On an equal footing

At Meesho, I haven’t felt like I have missed out on any professional opportunity because of my gender. There is no difference or preference shown to me vis-a-vis my teammates (most of whom are guys, which you must have guessed by now). What is expected out of each and every member of the team — is expected out of me — gender no bar.

The other thing I love at Meesho is that here I can try new things, people are always welcome to change here. If I want to try a new tool, one that is not being currently used in our existing tech, as long as there is logic and reasoning behind its use, I can go ahead and experiment with it. Autonomy in decision making is expected of you at Meesho.

I love participating in Tech team activities including Cricket Wednesdays and the recently held Meesho Premier League and also Meesho Hackathons.

Asha (extreme left) at the Meesho Premier League

Participating in Meesho hackathons has been an eye opener for me. I actually understood the importance of product while participating. As engineers, what we think would make for a successful product is not necessarily how it will work out. Because when you build a product, it might be too much of a tech feature. You might think you have built an amazing product, but a layman/or end user may or may not find it beneficial. And you won’t see that until and unless you start thinking like how a user/reseller thinks. So the challenge lies in how much can you define the tech within those user parameters. This was a great learning for me at the hackathon.

Asha and the Tech team during Hack.Mee (2.0) — The Meesho Hackathon

In conclusion, I think one of my biggest learnings at Meesho has been that I have learnt to take ownership here. And that you have to fail sometimes in order for you to be able to understand and fix those failings. Fixing your mistakes is a very important step to development and unless you get an error or make one, you will never know how to fix it. And this can only happen when when you learn to take ownership.

Want to strengthen Meesho’s women tech force and help create 20 million entrepreneurs by 2020? Then apply here. We are hiring!