Led by the CEO’s office with the help of the Business-Finance team, Kaizen’s company-wide adoption has unlocked infinite value adds at Meesho.

60-second takeaway

  • Kaizen was introduced to Meesho in 2022 to bring structure to our continuous problem-discovery model.
  • First adopted by Meesho leaders, the model gave the strategy team great visibility into key functions and warning signs for future metrics and led to discussions regarding data trends.
  • Eventually, the Kaizen model was decentralised, and all Meeshoites were invited to participate in weekly Kaizen sessions actively.
  • This problem-discovery model has been beneficial for Meesho in many ways. For example, it has encouraged and empowered all employees to identify problems and solve them, reinforced our belief to always rely on data, and created an atmosphere for innovation and experimentation.
  • Since its implementation, Kaizen has helped Meeshoites identify key areas of improvement and nurtured synergy.

For any company that’s committed to growth like we are, having an organisation-wide system to grow continually is an indispensable priority. And that’s why we integrated the " Kaizen " business philosophy into our ecosystem. Meesho was already on a path of Continuous Problem Discovery (CPD) and acting on it in 2022. But it happened on a team-by-team basis. In order to give some structure to this ideology, we decided to integrate Kaizen more holistically.

Why Kaizen?

Kaizen translates to better or continuous improvement in Japanese, and if the success of companies like Toyota and Nike is anything to go by, this interpretation holds up.

The Kaizen philosophy primarily focuses on identifying areas of improvement and implementing changes to make the organisation more efficient, effective, and competitive. And it does this by involving all the functions in the process of identifying problems, suggesting solutions, and implementing changes, leading to increased employee engagement, productivity, and quality.

While as a broad concept, Kaizen has been interpreted in many ways, it works on the belief that everything can be improved and to never rely on the status quo. Some of its key principles include:

  • Let go of assumptions and challenge the status quo
  • Question the obvious until you get to the root cause
  • Solve problems proactively, and find solutions in failures
  • Choose iterative, cost-effective, changes over perfectionism
  • Create an environment of curiosity, collaboration and constructive feedback
  • Never stop introspecting and improving

Phase 1: Adoption by leaders

In the last quarter of 2022, the central strategy team at Meesho decided to adopt Kaizen as a visibility tool to study key metrics across all charters. They had three agendas in mind:

  • Provide visibility of key business lines to leadership
  • Identify warning signals in a pre-emptive fashion through data
  • Facilitate discussions on short-term and long-term data trends

Led by the CEO’s office with the help of the Business-Finance team, Kaizen’s adoption proved fruitful early on.

Since the reliance on data and analysis to identify areas of improvement and measure the impact of changes is at the root of Kaizen, Meesho leaders were able to consistently make informed decisions based on objective evidence rather than intuitions or assumptions.

Within weeks, we were significantly reducing inefficiencies.  Once Kaizen’s potential to unlock infinite value at Meesho was identified, it was a no-brainer to decentralise the whole process. And so we entered...

Phase 2: De-Centralised Kaizen

If the leaders were able to get deep insights based on data, how much more nuanced and organic could it get when owners of key metrics are also able to meaningfully contribute to these learnings?

Answer: Infinitely more!

Compared to the Strategy team (S team), they have far more visibility into the granular details of why some metrics are thriving while others are dipping. Their inputs are not only richer, but enhanced visibility also ensured that corrective actions — wherever required — are quicker.

So, a new system was developed where individual teams would implement a weekly Kaizen Review Process. Within two months, we effectively decentralised Kaizen. And thus began a model where various orgs would present their respective Kaizen views, empowering functions to own their review metrics and highlight problem areas. Teams across the company redefined the formats, content, and frequency of their review meetings to accommodate Kaizen requirements.

This widespread adoption of Kaizen was made possible with clear ownership and accountability, without adding any overhead to the teams’ workload.

A Seamless Integration

To ensure that the integration of the Kaizen review mechanism is organic across the company, we have taken several measures:

  • Empower people: Having clear goals and objectives for each team that align with Meesho’s overarching strategic objectives boost understanding of the business, including among individual contributors. Engaging employees at all levels of the organisation has been critical to the organic integration of the new and improved review mechanism. Meeshoites across the company know more about contemporary teams, and are better equipped to employ second-order thinking when working on their problems.
  • Trust the data: Kaizen thrives on data and that data trumps intuitions and assumptions. In fact, during every single meeting, we receive a large number of new data that we understand, organise and use for problem discovery and uncovering blindspots. We even have facilitators to ensure that data is king and that it is measured continuously and consistently.
  • Innovate, experiment: Employees are able to welcome change, equipped to experiment with new ideas, and learn from failures. As an organisation, we encourage feedback and suggestions for improvement, regularly recognise valuable contributions, and offer opportunities for continued improvement.

What’s Changed?

Today, we are able to consolidate the learnings and proposed solutions from every team in the organisation once a week to discuss which levers have moved and which haven’t. A large chunk of these meetings are spent on democratically discussing all the new problem discoveries and improvement opportunities that the team members have identified. Many of our big bet opportunities are identified in these meetings. Kaizen has helped us identify blindspots between two teams or business units. For example,

When you order online, you get a projected timeline for delivery. More often than not, we under-promise, and deliveries occur 5-6 days before the expected arrival time. The issue — brought to the forefront by Kaizen — got solved quickly, improving outcomes for both the fulfilment & experiences and the user growth team.

We were able to identify this big opportunity that, if addressed, can help us grow faster while improving customer experience. It wouldn’t have been possible if the two teams with stakes in this metric couldn’t deep-dive into their respective metrics and propose solutions in the same forum. And, because stakeholders are involved from the beginning, the solutioning happens much faster than usual.

Kaizen has proved to the best data-driven, solution-focused continuous improvement model for all Meeshoites.

CREDITS

Cover Image: Rahul Prakash

Sources: Karthik C, Rushikesh Bhagat, and Rajib Chatterjee