The Journey of a Techie at Urban Company

The most impressive people I know spent their time with their head down getting shit done for a long, long time.

I joined the Urban Company team a year ago. The first telephonic conversation I had with Raghav was enough for me to believe that indeed we are going to build a product our country has never experienced before. The best motivation behind working here is that unlike other structured organisations, I’m not just a cog here. We are involved in brainstorming for introducing new features, taking part in focused group discussions with people and even talking to our customers. In short we completely own the product we develop, right from pitching the idea to fixing its last bug.

When I joined, the first version of our website was released. We were only present in Delhi then. What we lacked was a system through which we could manage all the requests, schedule tickets for our customer experience team, manage all the dynamic services information and questionnaire for each category on the App. We were going to go live in multiple cities in the next month and we had to develop a system for this. Being hired as a web developer, I was put into building the dashboards from scratch. To give you an insight into how much we’ve grown since then – we now have over 23 sub-modules in the dashboard managed by different departments. With more than 70 cron jobs running daily, integrated chat support, monitoring the status of all our service professionals together and managing payments – these now serve as Urban Company‘s backbone.

In July, our complete engineering department was shuffled and I became a member of the development team for the version 1.0 of our customer iOS App. I was working with Aman – the lead iOS developer, Rahul – product designer and Manushi – lead quality analyst. Being a novice at mobile app development and having a sharp delivery timeline over my head, this was a huge challenge for me but as they say, “a great team can build wonders”, and so we did, releasing a better, brighter, updated customer iOS app with an integrated chat experience by the first week of September. We were trending on the App store since the first week of launch and were also listed amongst the top apps in the Lifestyle category. More recently, Tim Cook met Raghav Chandra, one of our founders, and tweeted that we are amongst India’s top iOS developers.

Great to hear from some of India’s top iOS developers today. Innovative apps and many ideas for the future! pic.twitter.com/ZhEfE7wNW7

— Tim Cook (@localhosttim_cook) May 18, 2016

November was a month of celebration for Urban Company. The whole engineering team went on a weekend trip to Landour. Being lazy lads we utilised it well by sleeping, having booze, star gazing, barbecuing and more, the most memorable moment being everyone running 4 km down the hill in search of Internet connection to solve a production issue. After this trip, I realised how much Urban Company is a family more than a company to most of us.

By the end of the year, we had launched monetisation, built our own event logging system, data science lab, alert systems, multi-server deployment architecture, smart communications and much more. With the team growing at a rapid pace and so many requests to address, it was getting difficult for us to interact with different departments. We now needed more structured processes. To be honest, I was unhappy about it, only later realising why it was necessary for us to win the battle. It helped us grow as a team and it showed – by February, we had completely revamped our non-booking flow and redesigned our chat from scratch on the app.

Also Read: The Tale of an Urban Company Hackathon

To be honest it was not all the new features I worked on that mattered. What made the difference for me in terms of learning was owning up things I developed. I will always be grateful to Urban Company for teaching me the value of ownership and taking me from the stage of ‘Will I be able to do this?’ to ‘Wow, I built it’.

Currently, I am working with the backend team on developing a feature for our next release. Join me at Urban Company – trust me, you’ll love it!

Liked Mayank’s story? Read Sahana’s story here.