When senior director, Suresh Joshi approached the issue of marketplace competitiveness, his first look confirmed the following: “Our initial services for sellers to review the best marketplace prices was insufficient, since 25% of the sellers took more than eight hours to opt-in. I led a bottoms-up ideation with my team in partnership with my product counterparts to conceive an innovative “hands off the wheel” dynamic pricing system for sellers. The design was acknowledged as transformational for third-party sellers’ marketplaces. However, we had to address risks of dynamic pricing in the absence of retail offering and related guardrails.”
Likewise, Suresh encountered the challenges of platform opportunities. Suresh informed me that, “A few larger sellers had started gaining competitive advantage by leveraging third-party repricing tools. It was an opportunity to level the playing field for all sellers and provide the best prices to customers.
“I partnered with other company teams and proposed a loosely coupled architecture that allowed us to leverage common capabilities while owning the build of best price determination and the guardrails system. This approach allowed my team to control our own destiny and address the risks of dynamic pricing for a pure third-party marketplace. It resulted in a flexible platform design that simplified new feature development and consolidated pricing updates across seller offers. This eliminated unnecessary traffic of individual seller feeds and optimized infrastructure costs.
“Organizational Design and Excellence was the constant focus, and my strategy was to build teams with presence in US and India for proximity to both customer/business and global platform partners. This ownership structure complemented with an organization health scorecard and a partner engagement mechanism allowed me to raise the bar on Engineering and Operational excellence and keep the deliverables on track.”
It seems that April 2016 regulatory requirements resulted in a revamp of the roadmap and required change leadership. . Suresh immediately created an interim roadmap to keep the engineering team focused and partnered with his platform counterparts to convert this into an opportunity to accelerate global features. The foresight that went into their architecture and the flexible design of the pricing system served the company well in reacting quickly to the changes. “We were able to take on new innovations such as machine learning based ‘competitive reference prices’ for unique offers. These innovations kept the teams motivated, enabling us to launch the Dynamic Pricing system on time,” Suresh said.
The bottom line impact was immense. First, the platform architecture allowed his company to control their own destiny. Suresh told me that, “…delight over 100 million potential customers, drove Amazon’s India marketplace price competitiveness from 60% in January 2015 to 82% by June 2017, and is now available to over 400,000 sellers.”
I asked Suresh what he felt were the key takeaways from his experience and he responded as follows.
- Dive deep into data to identify customer and seller bottlenecks and innovate.
- Control your own destiny through separation of concerns in platform architecture.
- Invest in common platform capabilities and engagement mechanisms to accelerate innovations.
- Leverage organizational health scorecards to ensure Engineering and Operational Excellence.
As Suresh’s closed his story what stuck with me was his consistent focus and insistence on the following: “…3 Cs of Clarity: Customer purpose, Courage to take bold bets, and Compassion to the needs of Customers/Sellers, colleagues and partners that made this memorable.”
Watch full video interview, below.
Contact Suresh via LinkedIn or his career WebFolio.
Fred Coon, CEO
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