Coursera, in association with Moneycontrol, organized a webinar series on – “Lead without Limits: Creating a Digital Future with Tech, Talent and Culture”. Emerging technologies herald an innovation era for businesses. The webinar focused on how data-driven insights empower companies to upskill the workforce, drive digital readiness and enable data literacy.
The engaging discussion on “scaling up digital operations for start-ups” included insights from Mr Dale Vaz, CTO, Swiggy; Mr Ramneek Khurana, Co-Founder & Head of Product and Technology, Lenskart; and Mr Raghav Gupta, Managing Director, India and APAC, Coursera.
Conducive ecosystem for tech talent
The COVID pandemic created a conducive ecosystem for an accelerated rate of digitization across industries and market segments. The same period also witnessed phenomenal growth opportunities for the start-up ecosystem. Ramneek observed that the start-ups served a large pool of competitive product and design talent and achieved a stage of maturity. He opined “we are on a fantastic path towards making an ecosystem which is self-sustaining and has got mature talent stream”.
Dale backed Ramneek's observation that the last couple of years has been a game-changer in streamlining tech-driven innovation across India, driven largely by growing demand from the middle-class segment consumption. The start-ups experienced a tailwind by building agility and tweaking their business model to meet burgeoning consumer demands and trends.
Raghav emphasized that Coursera has been at the forefront in bringing high-quality education to millions of people, including those pursuing higher education and working professionals and transforming lives through learning. This has necessarily accelerated during the pandemic – from supporting 20 colleges in the pre-pandemic era to more than 3700 campuses now globally.
Data-driven insights for business decisions
Dale explained how data-driven insights play an indispensable role in building a sustainable growth model for an on-demand convenience aggregator business model like Swiggy, operating at scale with multiple touchpoints. Insights into customer behaviour, purchasing trends and preferences helps Swiggy in profiling and mapping services according to customized consumer needs. Using AI and ML technologies provides critical insights on balancing consumer needs with business viability across the entire ecosystem.
Ramneek observed that the new-age start-ups took on already existing spaces and problems, and helped solve the real-life consumer needs through technology. To source the right talent, it was necessary to know the problems at hand and align the talent with technology know-how to solve those problems.
Raghav shared an additional perspective on Ramneek's observations – how an enterprise's human resources need to evolve, depending upon business maturity and customer-centricity. This, in turn, influences employees' learning goals as well, moving from learning tech skills to emphasizing learning "human" skills also. This, according to Raghav, is driven by growing clamour among businesses to seek professionals who are adept at leadership skills and lead business lines.
Capturing and synchronizing online and offline data journeys and keeping track of meaningful actions done by the customer, establishing user identities for profiling and using such data to customize offerings and drive the necessary outcome are some of the key ways Ramneek feels data insights help new-age start-ups gain a competitive advantage to drive consumer behaviour.
Dale threw light on how data plays a central role in driving decisions across the Swiggy ecosystem. The underlying data lake contains all the information, capturing and providing user segments end-to-end seamless visibility with about a billion events getting ingested in the data infrastructure. Above this lake resides the ML models which provide intelligent recommendations to drive consumer demand. He said, “Having a strong data lake coupled with automated tools and self-service human interfaces helps enable consumers make business decisions and positive consumer experience across the ecosystem”.
Embrace continuous learning culture for a future-ready enterprise
Raghav held embracing a continuous learning culture among employees is indispensable to creating an agile workforce. He shared a very interesting nugget: “a recent study points at a positive correlation between a company’s stock performance and the skill level proficiency”. Since there is still a demand-supply gap for skilled professionals across industries, companies must encourage resources upskilling across the organization through a learning pathway. Having a structured learning guide and internal knowledge sharing, opined Dale, is key to becoming "1%" better every single day.
The exciting discussion was rounded off with insights on key metrics to gauge business success. The panel outlined customer and employee Net Promoter Score (NPS), evaluating 'pits' and 'peaks' moments to streamline the user experience, user growth, revenue and OKR (Objective and Key Results) as some key metrics to measure the organization’s performance. To watch full conversation click here
Moneycontrol journalists were not involved in the creation of the article.
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