It’s been about a month now since Deepti and I are in Sydney. While we’ve been traveling a fair bit over the years, this travel to Sydney is, however, to live and work here! That way, it’s indeed a big move for us. We’re quite excited about living and working in Sydney and look forward to an enjoyable time in Straya!
How did all this happen? Why the move? Why now? What will you be doing in Australia?
Well, it just happened! Coming to think of it now, there wasn’t any specific reason to move out – either out of our jobs or from Bangalore. Both of us were doing quite well in our respective jobs and we had settled down fairly well in Bangalore. But then, turns out both of us seem to like to reboot and start afresh seeking out new challenges! Our personal and professional journeys have been fairly eventful and maybe that’s how we’d probably want to keep it as we go ahead.
On the work front…
I had an incredible last 3.5 years at Flipkart. It was great to be part of a very important story for India, and I don’t think it’d be wrong to say, for the world as well. One doesn’t realise the significance while inside, but when I look back now, I perhaps realise the gravity of it. Maybe it still hasn’t sunk it yet and it’ll continue to appear fairly normal. From where Flipkart was back in early 2015 to now, it’s been quite a journey, to put it mildly. I’m glad to have a played a part, however small, in that journey!
All of the 3.5 years I spent at Flipkart was on the seller/merchant platform. In the initial 1.5-2 years, I worked on products that helped sellers in Order Fulfillment – helping scale an early version of one product and built out a new one from scratch that grew to a fairly large scale!
The seller/merchant world was new to me and I didn’t even know the F of Fulfillment (I’m so tempted to insert a WTF joke here) when I started! Honestly, was a little skeptical initially on how well I’d do in such an area. However, I was myself surprised that I was not only able to build out a fairly good bunch of features and products, but develop a strong understanding of the customers and the domain over time!
Towards the latter part of my stint, which was another 1.5-2 years, I got promoted 😀 and was leading a team of PMs. This was an enriching experience and gave a very different perspective on a whole bunch of things – driving a product area and portfolio, how to make not only yourself, but the team more effective, thinking of career and personal growth and what it means for people. I learnt a lot of things through this experience! The team focusing on solving problems in the Selection & Listing areas – how to systematically identify missing Selection, how to enable our sellers to list selection and help them manage their selection through the business life cycle. There are some interesting and challenging problems in this space and it was a great experience to have got an exposure to those and a chance work on tackling those!
Things that made the Flipkart experience special..
The people, by far! A bunch of smart, energetic and passionate people who come together to make magic happen. Everyone – folks in tech, business, those in the warehouses and logistics, is extremely driven and the energy just rubs off on you. It’s incredible how something as massive as the Big Billion Days is put together and it’s an experience of a lifetime to be a part of one. I’ve been part of three of those and it’s been fantastic. Within our group, we had an excellent camaraderie and not a day passed without some banter, a passionately argument or simply bakar. I’ll miss the Seller Platform Product team for sure!
The quiz club, for sure! I must admit that one of the strong reasons for me to join Flipkart and continue to stay there was the Quiz Club. Although it was dormant for a bit in between, we’d have regular quizzes for a large part of the last 3.5 years. Again, it’s great to be around with a bunch of people who share a similar passion as yours. And I was happy that I could keep my quizzing connection going. I got to conduct a bunch of quizzes, win a few and participate in many!
Oh, and it’s a hat-trick of wins 🙂 Teamed up with @sambell111 and Achintya for the Entertainment quiz hosted by @rajeshgrad. Was a fun quiz! pic.twitter.com/o91xH4MVNa
— Nikhil Kulkarni (@nikhilnk) June 29, 2018
The farewell from the quiz club was quite special! 
All this sounds great! Why move at all?
Good question, right? I thought about it myself too. Well, it turned out that all the work that I had done over last 11-12 years was with Indian companies and largely focused on Indian market and customers. And I thought it might be a good time to get an experience of working in a global setup and at a place which has a global customer base.
So what will you be doing next?
I’ve joined Atlassian as a Sr PM in the Jira Cloud team at the Sydney office. If you’re in the tech world, it’s unlikely that you’ve not come across or used Atlassian’s products. It’s been a few weeks since I started and I’m quite liking it at Atlassian! I’m looking forward to learning more about building products in the enterprise world, esp in the project management and collaboration space and become a better PM learning from the peers and leaders across Atlassian.
And what’s Sydney like as a place to work and live?
Excellent! While this is true (the rent rates will shock you if you convert AUD to INR!), it’s otherwise been an a very pleasant experience – settling into work, finding a place to stay and setting it up, finding the Indian stores and eating at Saravanaa Bhavan and so on! Most places are accessible by public transport, parks mostly everywhere, waterfronts and beaches fairly close by. In all, it’s been a very enjoyable experience so far and we’re quite excited about working and living here.
When it rained on one of the days..
Wynyard Station in the CBD – where most of the city, including me, travels to for work
Oh, and we also watched Snow Patrol perform live!
Hopefully, I’ll get back to writing more often with this 🙂
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