Do you know what a Cockroach and I have in common?

Let me ask you this, have you ever seen a cockroach? It is very hard to find one honestly because they are never on the open surface, they are always in the depths. That’s exactly where you’ll find me also because like these creatures I always keep digging and going into the depths of things, till where my curiosity takes me.

When I was 8 years old, every morning I used to listen to my mother read the newspaper out loud to my Dada, and once I heard her reading about ‘Save the Tiger’.  It intrigued me and the very first question prompt in my mind was, ‘why, what’s so great about tigers?’ This was the time when I didn’t even have access to a computer or internet to search about tigers so I started asking all the adults around me. My parents, my uncles and aunts, my cousins, my friends at school, literally wherever possible. Then I planned trips across India to find this tiger and see what’s so great about it. 

For five years I kept on traveling to different National Parks in India, but no results. And then in Ranthambore National Park, I sighted my first tiger and I was stunned. It was pure bliss! Today, even after 11 years, I still go on safaris, searching more about tigers, wildlife, and nature, and keep going in the depths.

Last year I joined Enterprise India Fellowship, as a partner with the intent of learning business skills by Experiential Learning. But I was really curious and doubtful in the beginning. How will this go exactly? I literally ate my mentor Aditya Jhunjhunwala’s head to know the answer, but I was not going to get my answer until I went into the depth.

I dove deep and just kept on taking projects, as many as possible. So, an amazing thing about Enterprise is that we work on real business projects with actual businesses. But to get actual experience I realized that was not enough, I had to give some solid deliverables to these businesses so that not only do they get something out of the projects but even I get to learn and have a solid experience.

Like in May 2021 I was working with a Coffee e-commerce platform called Total Coffee, helping them build a solid marketing strategy for their brand. Now of course, our team at Enterprise was helping me and my team to understand the flow of the project and the deliverables we can provide but to be honest I was not satisfied, I felt that we could do a lot more for the company. Surprisingly while this project was going on, in our regular Tuesday session we were introduced to SEO tools like Google Ads and SEMrush. That’s when it clicked for me that, now these are the tools I can use to give some solid deliverables to an e-commerce platform, by doing SEO analysis of their brand and their competitor brands and giving them core keywords that they can use for marketing. This made me more curious about research skills and tools that we can use for businesses and I wanted to go deeper.

I openly shared this with the Enterprise team and they gave me a project on User Research, which was really challenging but this was the depth of research work I was looking for. I was working for a company called Thrills N Trails, which provides recreational workshops for specially-abled kids. I and my partner on this project Steon and Mrunmayee, dove deep into competitor analysis, defining the company’s differentiating factor, doing user interviews to understand their core needs, pains, and gains, from which we found the company’s persona and created a value proposition of the company. I got really interested and curious about this process. In fact many times I and my partner Steon used to have meetings till night 2 am, constantly just working on this project. But still, I was not satisfied. I wanted to know more about how we can use this research now to create a marketing strategy for the company. Frankly, we were really lost as we didn’t know how to make this research in a usable way. We had several discussions with the Enterprise team and we were introduced to touchpoints and that’s where we found our gold mine. Then we created a whole booklet of Marketing Communication Guidelines, based on our research, for Thrills N Trails. This was my first User Research project and I was really fascinated by this process because I was getting so much core understanding of a business and this core understanding is the exact thing I liked. 

Honestly, I was still not satisfied and wanted to go deeper into research work. I wanted to do at least ten such user research projects. I used to be really open with the Enterprise team, I literally used to go to our space to meet Adi and say “Adi muje bore hora, muje ek research project chahiye and work to learn that skill really well” and right there I Adi and Ankita, told me about to projects with core and creative research work, writing a whitepaper and working on community building for a brand call Pilates with Aarti.

Today, of course, I have learned many industrial and life skills and got introduced to many useful tools, but most importantly I have given time and space to my curiosity by going into the depths and finding out my interests, skills that I want to develop,  and now want to embark on my next journey of being an Enterprise Fellow. Well, I guess this journey of depth is never-ending, but through my one-year journey as an Enterprise Partner I understand that being just curious is not enough but combining it with exploration and going into the depths is a lot more important to actually get things done.