We Are the Champions: Meet the National Winners of Flipkart WiRED 5.0 (HR Track) from MDI Gurgaon

It was an overwhelming feeling when our team name was announced for the winner's title. Our hard work, sleepless nights, and dedication finally paid off! Here is an account of our journey to becoming the National Winners of Flipkart WiRED 5.0 (HR track).

With the participation of more than 13,000 teams across India, WiRED is no doubt one of the most premium competitions. The problem statements in WiRED are real-world and challenging. The submission quality is high and all the participants spend a significant amount of time developing their solutions and presentations. The judgment criteria are very clear and the bar is very high. Although the competition has multiple rounds, teams get enough time to gradually expand and develop their ideas. The clear and elaborate communication from the organizing team makes the competition a breeze in terms of experience.

Step-by-step we paved the way to victory

The foundation stone of winning a competition is forming a great team. In our case, we all came with different backgrounds and experiences which helped us in viewing things in a holistic manner. Sana, being an architect, formed our creative backbone. She came up with concepts and helped in ideating. Since I already had experience in the software company, I ensured that our solutions are implementable in practice and are relevant in the context of Flipkart. Aman's experience of consulting large corporations helped us develop smooth processes and KPIs for implementation plans for our submission.

After forming our team, we went through the problem statement document together. We started sharing our interpretation of the problem statement to ensure we have a clear and consistent understanding. We then started conceptualizing ideas for the problem and jotting them down individually. We met at regular intervals to ping-pong our ideas with each other and improve them. We also talked to many Flipkart employees and researched online to understand the challenges and industry trends in general. Once, we had a large idea pool, we selected the top ideas for our presentation. The most challenging phase was selecting 3 ideas for semi-finals from the bag of ideas we had suggested in our previous round.

No obstacle is too big!

Working online has become the norm by now. So although we were not on campus, we ensured we had video calls throughout the competition. Even when working on our individual parts, we would schedule short calls for updates and share our current challenges. Our WhatsApp group was the most active group as we were constantly posting our updates and even jokes and memes to keep ourselves motivated and entertained.

We were fortunate to not have many conflicts during our discussions. Although we had very passionate debates on our points of view, we ensured we spoke respectfully, gave each other enough time and space to present their mindset, and only moved forward when everyone was convinced.

Not to forget to mention one key learning that it is easy to conceptualize ideas sitting in an office/room, but the real challenge is developing a practical implementation plan which can be scaled throughout the organization especially for a company as big as Flipkart. A lot of factors have to be considered to ensure the plan is holistic yet simple enough to be understood by everyone!