Maximising Tech @ Flipkart

The Indian Ecommerce space is brimming with tech offerings, taking consumers’ shopping and brand interaction experience to a whole new level. With the onset of Covid-19, the space has been put into a hyperdrive, with consumers choosing to transact heavily online, more so than ever before! To tackle the problems of scale and personalisation for Indian consumers, and disrupt the Ecommerce space through Tech-led innovations, Flipkart has been on a journey of evolving its offerings to stay ahead of the curve by building deep expertise in Emerging Technologies such as AI/ML, Block Chain, IoT, AR/VR and more. 

With this as our North star, the Flipkart Tech Marvel program was launched with a vision to strengthen our capabilities in these technologies and promote learning and experimentation leading to bottom-up innovation. The brainchild of Flipkart’s learning and development powerhouse, Flipskool, that keeps the learner at the center of everything by recognising and maximising their abilities through well curated experiences, the Tech Marvel program aims to democratise learning, providing Flipsters the agency to chart and own their learning, while the organization provides all the ecosystem support like mentors, Communities of Practice and Industry perspectives. The Tech Marvel program has witnessed many success stories. We recount a couple of them here!

Meet Prasad Pai and Swaraj Mohanty, two of our talented Software Development Engineers who decided to maximise their skills and knowledge in emerging technologies through this program.

Prasad, an SDE III, who was part of this year’s Tech Marvel program, decided to specialise in Deep Learning. This was his second time scoping out opportunities that the program had to offer and providing solutions successfully. As a passionate engineer who has previously worked in Software Development and Machine Learning, Prasad aims to transition into the role of a Data Scientist eventually. The course he undertook was six months long, with four months to learn and two months to put the theories into working solutions. For Prasad, this presented an opportunity to solve the issue of fake and irrelevant ratings and reviews on products online - a serious concern that hinders authentic customer experience. He decided to make this his use case and worked towards solving it. With the guidance of mentors and the leadership who helped him manage, colleagues who collaborated to execute solutions, and pointed market insights from industry leaders, Prasad was able to optimise the Flipkart platform and continues to do so.  

Just like Prasad, Swaraj Mohanty, an SDE III, also enrolled in the same course. After completing the 6-month course, Swaraj was able to address and solve a seller issue that had lasted for a few years. The solution he offered was simple enough to be executed quickly, so he tried it out for two months, and it worked!

Swaraj leveraged the freedom and the flexibility of the program to keep himself accountable towards building for a larger problem at hand. He was able to transition himself from a student of the course to a problem solver in just six months, and vows to remain curious and entrepreneurial going forward as well.  

The icing on the cake for the learner experience as part of the Tech Marvel program was the creation of 'communities of practice' that encouraged them to share synopsis of their learning and ideations with a community of like minded learners thus empowering our people to Experiment, Learn, Grow and be the maximizers!

The Flipkart environment encourages Flipsters to scale their own feats and fan the flames of passion for tech through unique opportunities. As Swaraj said, “Exceeding one’s own expectations will need us to work harder. But when we witness the impact it can make, we know that we are on the right track.” And come this BBD, we’re sure that such upskilling capabilities will contribute to providing a seamless shopping experience for the Indian consumer.