From Walmart to BigBasket – Sumit Nigam takes on the VP of Engineering Role

Introduction 

Founded in 2011, E-grocery giant - BigBasket is India’s largest supermarket today. Present across 100+ Indian cities, the TATA Enterprise provides an easy, relaxed way of browsing and shopping for groceries. Users can select and buy products of their choice within the comfort of their homes. As one of the largest e-grocery providers (50,000+ SKUs), BigBasket offers convenient home deliveries on preferred dates and times. In June 2022, BigBasket raised a Series F funding of $45.1M rounding it to $853M in total funding. 

Problem Statement 

To become a full-tech integrated brand, BigBasket sought a seasoned techie to add to its tech team. The mandate was for a VP of Engineering or Head of Engineering. The leader would oversee building large-scale cloud-based distributed systems and be hands-on with technology and architecture, be agile, and be high on execution. 

Solution and Execution 

BigBasket is a classic example of a domestic brand that has grown leaps and bounds and thrived. The team was looking for someone with the right cultural fit. BigBasket management wanted a leader who was associated with high growth, branding, scalability, a strategist and most importantly a person with innovative & novel ideas for the company. 

Purple Quarter understood the mandate to the T. After thoughtful brainstorming and profiling of the right fit, Sumit Nigam’s biography was shared with the BigBasket team. Sumit comes with about 25 years of technical and product knowledge. An alumnus of NIT Calicut, Sumit was the erstwhile engineer at Walmart Global Tech. He has been previously associated with brands such as Informatica, Dell EMC and eBay among others. 

Purple Quarter’s Behavioural Metrics Model (BMM) accurately profiled Sumit as a Nurturer; he has a proven record of building projects ground up, managing diverse teams, hands-on experience with building data and has seen scalability. These milestones primarily fit perfectly into the requirements of BigBasket. Sumit’s past role at Walmart revolved around the supply chain which is in the plans of BigBasket’s roadmap. What really worked for the two was the value proposition. Sumit viewed BigBasket as a mature company managed by competent people seeking growth. From their very first conversation, Rakshit (CTPO at BigBasket) and Sumit connected over the company’s vision and shared the same ideologies. 

Sumit’s Journey at BigBasket  

With Sumit Nigam and other technologies on board, BigBasket expanded its footprints to other cities. They also scaled up the number of stores to expand their reach. Under the leadership of Sumit, the engineering team enhanced the end-consumer experience, increased scalability, and gained a competitive tech edge in the market. After serving the role of VP of Engineering for a year, Sumit moved on from BigBasket to explore newer roles.

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