Prioritizing What Must Be Done Is One Of The Most Important Things – Deepthi Singh, Snapdeal !

Deepthi Singh is the Senior Director, Multimedia Research Group in Snapdeal. Deepthi has a skill set that she has gained from over a dozen years of experience handling various positions in the IT industry ranging from Adobe, Yahoo to her very own startup prior to her role in Snapdeal. Deepthi talks about her roles and responsibilities

1. Can you elaborate a little about your role? In your role, what are some of your key priorities?

I am associated with Snapdeal as a Senior Director in the Multimedia Research Group for over a year. My team at Snapdeal transfers output from scientific research to products. We work with researchers to build PoCs and turn them into production components for our partner teams to use. Image Search and FindMyStyle.in are among the products that we have built.

My key priority at Snapdeal is to take research and make it easy to use for our engineering teams to solve business problems.

2. What kind of industry trends are you seeing when it comes to customer engagement using multimedia?

Multimedia plays a key role in driving buyer decisions in e-commerce. Eventually, the buyer should be able to experience any product as if in person. At the same time, it should be easy for the seller to enable such experiences.

Over time, we have seen the number of products listed on Snapdeal increase drastically. Browsing such huge volume of data using the tradional ways may not work 100% of the time. Using multimedia, it is possible to enable some powerful ways to browse large catalogs.

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3. What are some of the initiatives you are undertaking to ensure customer engagement?

On one hand, we are focusing on helping sellers’ list products with good quality images. On the other hand, we are making it easy for buyers to get to what they are looking for through products like image search, color search and so on. Check findmystyle.in to get sneak previews of some of the interesting things we are doing.

4. Can you tell us about life as a Woman Leader at Snapdeal? How does Snapdeal help its women folks to succeed?

Life as a woman leader at Snapdeal has been very action packed and fulfilling. In addition to the work, you get to be a part of many initiatives like special trainings, events and so on.

Diversity is a way of life at Snapdeal and we are nurturing a culture that respects it. Our philosophy is to create a people-first workplace that ensures holistic attention to all employee needs, so that everyone feels relaxed and energized when they come to work every day. Operationally, we have been delivering this through programs under Advitya, the diversity and inclusion charter. The focus of Advityais to make the organization inclusive towards all forms of diversity – gender, disability, sexual orientation, cultures and any other. We believe in celebrating uniqueness, which is a key strength of Snapdeal. Also, our engineers, a significant portion of who are women, work in diverse teams and build world-class products. They organize and participate in various tech-events and help shape Snapdeal into a leading technology company.

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5. What is your success mantra – some of the key learnings in life that you stick to?

Prioritizing what must be done is one of the most important things.

6. What advice would you give your 20 year old self?

If you think you need to prove yourself, others will too. If you think you are awesome, others will too!

7. How easy / difficult it is for women in tech to break the glass ceiling? What would be your advice to other women trying to break the class ceiling?

Women need to see more examples to look up to than we currently do in the technology industry. In the early 2000s when I joined the industry, there was only one other woman coder in a company of around 200 people. A welcome change is, the gender ratio is much healthier at the entry level now. However, even today many women do not stay for the long haul and, it takes time to be able to set an example.  In my opinion, encouraging and enabling women to stay for the long haul will certainly help.