Building an intrapreneurial culture
Intrapreneurship has often been heralded as the holy grail of success for various organizations. Great ideas and products are often conceived and nurtured by individuals, while the organization must sense the potential of these ideas and help take them to fruition.
Intrapreneurs are self-motivated, proactive, and action-oriented people who take the initiative to pursue an innovative product or service. There are various such individuals who have led or been associated with challenging projects at ClearTax by donning multiple hats, taking on high accountability, and have been an integral part of our growth journey. We interviewed some such CTzens to understand their experience as intrapreneurs and tried to find out what kind of environment is conducive for intrapreneurial mindset to thrive. Here are some extracts from our discourses
Surbhi Punshi | Product
I have worked on various interesting projects at Cleartax but the one closest to me is the GST launch, which was a crucial project when we were entering into the B2B market for the first time and GST itself was a new concept in India which would take time to stabilize.
As a CA in the product team, I got the opportunity to work on this project from ideation to development along with creating internal and external awareness through forums like CFO forums, webinars, e-learning courses etc. The stakes were high — if the software was inaccurate or substandard, it would result in non-adoption and would undermine the organizations’ reputation as a tax expert. On the other hand, success would open doors for entering a new market and building my own credibility and experience as a tax professional.
By creating GST awareness for the product, support, category and marketing teams, as well as external events like webinars, I changed personally because I used to be an introvert but through this experience I lost my stage and camera fear and find it easy to communicate with anyone.
Essential environmental levers: Freedom to ideate and create | Trust in employees
Sankalp Kumar | Category
I was involved in the project of unlocking growth for the B2B business by driving customer acquisition of Tax Experts and SMBs. Our aim was to become the #1 Compliance software in India. Our AOP goals were framed keeping aggressive targets around customer acquisitions and the onus was on me to deliver the same. This was not only linked with top line targets but was a very strategic initiative as well since it would in turn open up multiple other business opportunities and make Cleartax a much bigger brand. On the other hand, failure in achieving the desired growth would hurt the company’s bottom line as well as have a downward spiral effect on other business opportunities.
I personally learnt a lot from this experience. It helped to shape me as per Cleartax’s leadership competencies including high customer obsession, have a bias to action and bifocal thinking. This project gave me an opportunity and a very rich experience in interacting and collaborating with multiple teams including Sales, Marketing, Product, Support and Finance.
Essential environmental levers: Encouraging fearless thinking | Seamless exchange of ideas | Reward for demonstrating proactiveness | Goal clarity | Transparency
Rajesh Magham | Engineering
In my projects prior to joining Cleartax, I was deeply involved technically and hence was primarily dependent on my own self to deliver the executables. It was another ballgame handling a team on joining ClearTax and trusting them with execution.
During most of my projects during work-from-home, I have been dependent on the team for the analysis and estimates. Most of the projects were on forms and reports which can directly improve customer experience and get more filings through the platform.
With these experiences I learned to trust them with analysis, breakup, estimates on top of delivery. Giving up control has been a slightly tough exercise but immensely rewarding.
Essential environmental levers: Clear goal | Giving up on micromanagement
Abhilash ST | Marketing
At Cleartax, I am responsible for organic marketing & user acquisition. This is an extensive piece that requires domain expertise as well as an adaptable structure to the ever-changing market. I worked on multiple projects for new user acquisition and all these projects were completely conceptualized and built within the marketing team with support from the marketing tech team. Since the product team was tied up with building out the actual product, we had to do the heavy lifting in terms of product management, design, data mining for our projects. The lack of resources was a blessing in disguise since it helped me improve my own problem solving skills and made me search for solutions personally. With the influence of tech knowledge and marketing expertise, we were able to come up with solutions that have never been implemented in similar scenarios before, and propel growth for the function.
Through this journey I have leant to analyze situations and make the right decisions with better ease. It has also been rewarding because I have had the opportunity to learn a lot of new things.
Essential environmental levers: Constructive and transparent culture | Solid feedback loop | Proper mentorship
Vignesh V | Product
Last year there was a strong impetus for making the ClearTax GST product much more comprehensive for Tax experts. There was also a growing need to create alternative scalable solutions that reduce bottlenecks, save costs on existing API based solutions built for powering GST compliance needs for customers. Thus there was an opportunity to build a robust desktop solution for customers. I got the opportunity to be involved on this project from the early days to make it successful.
Building a Desktop solution without prior knowledge & experience had its own risks and challenges. Dealing with a lot of unknowns which are beyond our control has been one among the key risks. This gave us a learning to be prepared ahead, analyzing impacts thoroughly, identifying gaps quickly and iterating fast etc to better deal with unknowns from the early days onwards.
Every such challenging experience helps one become stronger with confidence and provide immense strength to become more grateful & humble to serve the team & users better.
Essential environmental levers: Clear goal | Competent team | Customer obsession | Freedom to experiment
Conclusion
The encouragement of intrapreneurship presents a high risk-high reward opportunity for both the intrapreneur and the organization alike. From our discussions, we can conclude that giving and receiving such opportunities to explore unconventional ideas and solutions are both challenging but have led to transformational changes in the organization as well as for the individual. Clarity of goal, a motivated team and transparency appear to be the building blocks of intrapreneurship at ClearTax.
