Avi Singh Raghuwanshi, works as an Associate Product Manager (APM) at Blinkit. He joined us on our instant delivery journey in July 2022. He previously worked on upselling and cross selling through product listing pages during his first two months. His current focus includes improving conversions in Mumbai through targeted assortment and maintaining availability.
Tell us about your background and your journey in Blinkit so far.
Having a dynamic nature, right from my school days, I have always tried to keep myself involved in multiple activities alongside academics. However, I stuck to badminton and represented the Jabalpur district on state level for three consecutive years. This taught me the importance of discipline in life.
Graduating from IIT Kharagpur helped me in shaping myself holistically. The opportunity to work for the student body, as well as, taking up positions of responsibilities on campus helped me develop my managerial skills. At the same time, I always made sure to stay close with technology by doing internships in multiple domains including software development, data analytics, consultancy and product management.
Post graduation, I joined Blinkit as an APM and it proved to be a perfect fit for my dynamic nature. As a part of the product listing page team, I received the opportunity to understand customers and build for them while ensuring business goals were met. Last month I shifted to the assortment side of our business. Since then, it has been a very exciting journey with newer problems and challenges.
Product Listing page on the Blinkit App
Why did you choose to work in tech? What drove you?
I strongly believe that most problems have been solved by miraculous yet simple technologically-driven solutions. Such solutions always go a long way and help us stay lean. The opportunities around me at my college helped me start my journey to solve real world problems with tech solutions and I have found this to be a good fit for myself.
What excites you the most about your field?
Working with cross functional teams, staying close to the end customer and the challenge to find a sweet spot between business and customer demands is what excites me the most about my role as an APM.
While solving a problem, what is the principle you always adhere to?
Ensuring that the problem is worth solving and eradicating biases in my decisions, is one of my biggest learnings so far and this is something which I’ll always stick to while solving problems.
What are your views on the future of technology in your domain?
From the outside, quick commerce looks like a very supply chain centric industry with manual intervention, but very few understand the significance of tech behind the magic we use to deliver to our customers. Each and every aspect of this business has a tech intervention which helps us in optimising time, space, and capital utilisation. The efficiency of each actor in our business including our on-ground picking staff and delivery partners is driven by the technology which enables us to be super quick with our deliveries. There is an ocean of products available in this world today but the space constraints in the quick commerce industry requires a very accurate prediction of demand and assortment at a hyperlocal level. I feel that the first one to crack this with a super accurate model will have an unbeatable advantage in the industry.
What do you love the most about your role at Blinkit?
The dynamic nature of work, plethora of opportunities to solve impactful problems and the smart pool of people around me are my favourite parts of working at Blinkit.
What would you say to a youngster interested in working at Blinkit?
One of the most important things for a youngster is to have enough opportunities to learn quickly at an early stage. Learning is always quick if you have the right problems at your disposal, good guidance and freedom to make decisions without fear. Blinkit provides such an environment to a youngster. If a person is curious about things and is ready to acquire new skills quickly Blinkit would be the right place to work and grow exponentially.
How do you strike the life-work balance?
Efficiency and prioritisation is my mantra for maintaining a good work-life balance and it has been super helpful for me so far.
[Avi is an APM at Blinkit. You can follow him on Linkedin.]
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