Saumya Singh Rathore, Co-Founder, WinZO Games talks about business in the time of COVID19
How has COVID19 affected your business?
Being a Tech and Data company, we had great learnings from our last venture, ZO Rooms & Zostel. ZO Rooms and Zostel were operationally very heavy therefore we decided to build WinZO as a lean and agile company. In a tech-product company, one of the critical interactions are the coordinated efforts between the product and the tech team. Since day one, communication between departments has been well structured. Hence, we are not facing big challenges on this end.
However, being in a social entertainment business, we are seeing traction more than what we expected. This coming in the time when the teams were operating remotely and we did face an initial challenge managing a sudden surge. Amid the lockdown, people are marjory keeping themselves entertained by participating in online games. We at WinZO saw an upsurge of 30% in the Tier 1 traffic coming on our platform. Our game-plays went 3x during the weekend, we quickly rolled-out content like PUBG, Ludo and Free Fire on our platform, to contribute our best possible to keep people distracted in these unfortunate times.
How are your teams working and communicating during such times?
At WinZO, we really believe that effective communication is the key to great execution. This is critical to us because when building a tech product as deep as ours, there is an orchestration of skills going on behind the curtains. While no virtual mode of communication can really replace people huddling together. In unprecedented times like these, when it’s about safety and health, we are going remote- using Slack for seamless internal communication and Zoom/Hangouts for meetings.
For task management of the IT team, we have always been using JIRA to follow agile methodology of development. It simply allows one to prioritize work and keeps everyone on the same page. There is huge visibility on the bandwidth of team and progress of projects and sprints against timelines. Everyone is available through Gmail/Whatsapp/Slack etc. as well.
Systems and processes have seen new changes. Do you feel the new way of working will change the way we worked in offices?
I think it requires a proper process setup in the organization for work from home so that business and deliveries does not take a hit. WFH helps determine the loopholes an organization has in its set-up processes. I am sure people will have some interesting observations during this time which will help organizations evolve their processes and definitely adopting WFH will be the next big step for big corporations.
This is a once in a lifetime event for all of us, do share your reason for optimism?
Everyone has access to smartphones and the internet these days. The digital revolution in India has led to faster access to information which has helped spread awareness among. All digital platforms are on the foot front helping credible information reach to their users. We are also continuously churning preventive measures and other updates on COVID-19 on our company’s social media handles and WhatsApp group to keep our users and employees updated. During this time, we should help negate panic, calm others and resist spreading unnecessary rumors.
