On 1 March 2021, I started working with DiDi, after having spent almost a year looking for jobs. Well, graduating in the middle of the pandemic did not help my job prospects much, but having an MBA degree with no job did not seem like a great beginning to my “new” career path.
Despite all the challenges in the world economy and the industry due to the pandemic, DiDi Global, the Chinese giant in the ride-hailing market and the challenger to Uber’s global hegemony, offered me a role in their leadership development program. DiDi was willing to bet on me, an MBA graduate, with no particular skills or experience, apart from maybe doing some stuff on excel and googling, to groom and mentor me for a future leadership position in the company.
No matter what people say or think about MBA graduates, the truth for me is that I was an average student, with average thinking abilities and definitely below average knowledge of working in a business as complex ride-hailing. I was infinitely grateful for this opportunity, because I knew they hired me based on pretty much nothing apart from some well practiced things I had said in the interviews. Even after my joining date was pushed from Sep 2021 to March 2022, I was able to keep calm, always finding solace in the fact that I did have a job and future cash flows which would help me pay my loan back.
At the time when we had finalised the offer terms, I was supposed to move to Melbourne, Australia for a minimum period of 6 months and work with the newly launched business in the country. This was to ensure I would get experience working in a fast-moving launch environment. After those 6 months, I would have to spend about 3 months in the HQ in Beijing, China to work closely to with product development team, to understand how things are done behind the scenes. And if my performance was agreeable and there was vacancy in the team, I would continue to work for the Australia team to help them grow and expand the business. All of the above was a really exciting prospect for me; an eager graduate looking to create impact in the world of business.
But then, how we plan things and how things turnout are often very different and distinct. Due to the pandemic, the Australian and the Chinese governments had stopped giving out work visas, and all the carefully thought out plans for my future seemed a bit pre-mature. In the light of these new and unexpected developments, the HR team reached out to me with a new proposal: An opportunity to work for the UK launch. All of this was happening in February 2021, a few weeks before I was supposed to start working, but nothing about the whole situation had been precedented. The only thing to do was wait and see how things turn out. The new change was quite fortuitous, as I had always wanted to work in Europe, and this opportunity really came out of nowhere. From making plans to moving to Australia, here I was starting work for a region in a completely different part of the world.
In the initial days, between all the trainings and sessions, I would spend time reading documents and case studies which would help me understand the industry and my role better. I was fully aware of the fact that I brought nothing to the table, but I was willing to learn and put into actions all the responsibilities of my role. One of my biggest take aways of this year has been during those initial 90 day period, where I was beginning to understand what was going on, and how can I contribute. In a small team and a fast paced work environment, responsibilities and roles are always in flux and ever expanding. In such a scenario, willingness to learn and step-in to help other people with their expanding roles is a great way for a junior employee to increase the scope of their work. This was something I learnt along the way, as I began helping the team out with business development, partnerships, marketing and sustainability. Everyone, including the senior leadership, was faced with this scenario and this turned out to be a great way to learn and go beyond the immediate job description. In doing so, I was exposed to very new, unfamiliar and very important functions of the business, and got a very macro view of how planning is done to launch a new city or a new business.
For 6 months, I worked on a variety of topics: Building a value proposition for drivers that is unique and different, creating the sustainability strategy and establishing relationships and strategic partnerships with. What I enjoyed the most was the pace of execution; the speed at which we would go from the drawing board to live action and then iterate based on response and learnings was incredible. As a result, the learning curve was steep, and the actions had tangible short term and long term consequence. It was very empowering to be a part of something like this, working together with great people with a collaborative spirit I had only read about. At B-school we learn a lot about teams and collaboration and how to work with people with different personality type than your own. It was incredible to see a multi cultural team, assembled from within DiDi and hired locally, people who had no experience of working together to work with such seamlessness. Everyone was open to talk, open to help out and would seek out not just to ask for help but to give away any support that would make things easier.
This atmosphere of collaboration and camaraderie was something I have never experienced before (in my limited career), and working in such a place made me love what I was doing, and kept me motivated everyday. Due to our aggressive timelines for launch, we were all hands on deck, working on key projects and initiatives which will form a string foundation for our launch in the UK. This launch was to be DiDi’s first foray into the western markets, beginning a long series of planned expansion all across western Europe. Hence it was imperative that our work for the UK was water-tight as we would be setting the benchmark for all the subsequent expansion projects.
Working for a startup comes with its own uncertainties and unpredictable circumstances. Even though DiDi can hardly be called a startup, the team in the UK was very much a small cohesive unit, with support from the HQ team. Given the volatile international geo-political climate and DiDi being a Chinese company, the challenges of beginning operations in the western part of the world was not lost on us. But despite all of our efforts and planning, due to situations and circumstances beyond our control, the senior leadership took the major decision of halting the expansion plans in UK and beyond. With a lot of uncertainty from various quarters: the IPO in NYSE, the Chinese government’s investigation into DiDi’s internal operations and the global regulatory scrutiny of the authorities, the environment became too turbulent for a successful launch of our operations.
This news came as huge disappointment for our team, as we had spent a lot of effort and resources to build a strong foundation to begin operations here. Most of the team were new hires or people who had relocated to a new continent, in the hope of building something new with DiDi in this exciting new phase for the company. All of these plans were brought to a sudden stand still, with a lot of uncertainty and anxiety around the future of the employees.
What happened next was a lesson in how to manage a crisis situation. I had never experienced such a situation before; just read about in various case studies and news articles. The most common route was that employees were let go, often without any notice or heads up. However, what ensued was a process with an international collaboration that I certainly did not expect. Most of the team was retained, and reallocated to new geographies and projects which allowed remote work. Despite the challenges with payroll, international laws and working across asynchronous timezones in a real-time business, the leadership team made it work for the most part. Almost everyone found a new role or a project and continued to work in this new and unexpected environment.
I started working for the Russian team, who were experiencing a shortage of resources and a heavy competitive onslaught by the incumbent Yandex. The Russian operations were at their nascent stages having begun only a few months before I started working with them. For me, the engagement was temporary, till I found something more long-term. I was to work on a project to improve driver retention and reduce fraud. I worked on this project for about 2 months, and in that short span of time my biggest achievement was to identify a major channel for fraud and taking steps to shut it down.
Then I started working for a new product launch in Tanzania. This was to be a completely new product and a new brand. I transitioned into a brand marketing role for this, working on the value proposition and customer acquisition while informing the marketing decisions through my knowledge of how the operations are run on daily basis. This project was super interesting for a a couple of reasons:
- We were creating a new brand from scratch. This was exciting as we had to build everything: right from the the visual identity of the brand which includes logo, fonts, colour schemes as well as the communication identity which includes messaging and how we speak to our users.
- We had to acquire customers, without actually being present in the market. All of our operations were going to be remote. So barring a few initial trips to Dar es Salaam, there was going to be no office, no personnel on the ground operation for us.
- We had to work with an extremely lean budget, in a market where Uber and Bolt were already present. Which just meant we had to be creative and make our dollar work harder.
The whole project has been a great learning experience for me, as I got to work and understand a business vertical which was completely unfamiliar to me. To launch a new product in a country where I was so far removed from everything, was indeed a difficult task, and the key was to keep a close ear to the ground and listen to what our local agencies and users tell us. A lot of the decision making was formed by taking inputs, both cultural and business, from our partners.
The biggest thing that I am thankful for this past year is that I got to chance to work with two great managers. Both of them have supported, guided and mentored me. They provided me opportunities to learn, grow and challenged me to be outside my comfort zone and for that I will be eternally grateful. They gave me the freedom and psychological safety to voice my opinion freely, and gave me a seat at meetings and discussions far above my place in the organisational hierarchy. I know this will not be able to work with them forever, but I know what kind of manager I want to work for and the kind of manager I hope to be.
