The Day I Spoke Up

Marketing was never my career plan

Today, I am known as a marketeer amongst my friends, my colleagues and in the industry. But a lot of people, or rather, a lot of folks, do not know that marketing was never my career plan or my first choice.

Hi, I'm Soumyajit. You can call me Soum. That's what my friends, colleagues and family call me.

I am a marketeer by profession, but I am also an avid food lover. I love travelling. I love watching movies. And something that is very unique and distinct about me is that I love sports, any sport. But my favourite is cricket, and I have been playing cricket for years. I'm very passionate about it.

Today, I'm going to talk about my untold work story.

I started my career not in marketing, but in the entertainment industry, to be precise, online gaming.

I was part of the transaction customer service team, helping people resolve queries and assisting them with their day-to-day online gaming.

Things were going pretty well. It was early in my career, and I was doing well. I was also chosen to be one of the youngest team leaders, and my team was doing pretty well.

But then, one day, something happened that changed my entire perspective about myself, my career and how I look at careers.

The day things didn't go as planned

Typically, in the online gaming industry, because these are real-time games, there is always a possibility of a high volume of incoming requests.

It could be requests around payments, gaming or any such requests that need to be resolved.

My team and I were on a shift one of those days when the volume was huge.

And we had to manage the entire thing. That was our day-to-day job.

But what stood out that day was that there was an enormous volume of incoming requests, which we were not necessarily equipped to handle.

And by the way, I'm talking about a decade when, forget about AI, we didn't even have automation or machine learning. These were all very new concepts.

But there was certainly technology. There was certainly tech support.

And I am pretty sure that, looking at the overall organisational structure and how we managed operations, technology could have always played a bigger role.

When the situation was reviewed by senior management and the leadership team, we did a deep dive together, and we really wanted to understand what the problem was.

Was the problem the technology?

Could technology have supported us better?

Was the problem the team's capability?

Was the problem operations management and how we handled the queries?

Or were there not enough people or enough capacity in the team to deliver what was expected?

Now, having said that, the team tried their best.

But it appeared, from the diagnosis or the entire deep dive, that it was the people who were not capable of handling the operations or the incoming volumes, which were huge that day.

I knew my team had done their best

Now, that really did not go down well with me because I have always felt that the team did their best. The team put in their best, and this was an outstanding team.

Even very recently, they had won awards for the outstanding work they had been doing.

So how is it that, on one fine day, when the incoming volumes were huge and the team tried their best, the expectation was still that we would have handled everything end to end, one hundred percent?

Now, I stood up and spoke my mind in front of the entire leadership team.

And my point was that it's not just about the people or their capability, but also about how you leverage technology properly, build innovation and build processes around technology that enable and facilitate the work.

Now, this was not an easy conversation.

As you can imagine, I was early in my career, and I was speaking to some pretty seasoned people.

Things could have gone differently. Things might not have gone well.

But I did speak my mind.

And today, when I reflect on it, I think that's something that really stuck with me and changed how I look at things.

What that conversation taught me

Even now, I think a lot of folks who know me in the industry, a lot of my friends who know me, will associate one thing with Soum: Soum always speaks his mind, but with a rationale.

And from this incident, I had a big learning, which really made me realise a lot of things.

The first is that there could be a way in which things are done, but not necessarily one size fits all.

And not necessarily do the same things need to continue in the same way.

You need to ask the right questions, with the right logic, and think about how you would want to do things differently.

And if you do that, more often than not, you are accepted.

So I also realised something about myself: I would want to work in an organisation that gives me the freedom to innovate, that gives me the freedom to build a team and build capability.

And one that does not stop me from learning fast, or rather, as some people might say, failing fast.

Thankfully, throughout my career, over the last two decades, the organisations I have worked with have given me that opportunity.

Staying relevant means continuing to learn

Also, interestingly, I have been at the intersection of technology, digital and marketing.

And typically, with technology evolving, digital and marketing have been evolving too.

Today, I can confidently say that I have seen a lot of changes. I have played around with a lot of technology, I have seen technology evolve, and yet I have been able to stay relevant.

This is my untold work story, where I realised that shaping your mindset is a very critical element if you want to continuously do things well in your career.

It could be marketing. It could be operations. It could be sales. It could be any function.

In my case, it has been marketing.

And hence, this is Soum the Marketeer speaking to you today.