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Everyone has a story waiting to be heard. We’re highlighting some of the amazing stories from within CleverTap — from our very own CTzens — because we believe in the amazing people we work with everyday and want to share the exciting work culture that we’ve built together. Presenting: the CTzens of CleverTap.
In the two years that I spent in Bengaluru, I had almost forgotten how much I love Mumbai, why I love it so much, and that home is where the heart is. Now that I’m back, I’m happy to be in the good company of family, friends, and peers, and sleeping restfully every night again.
I’m Sunny, your friendly UX writer at CleverTap. I’m from Aamchi Mumbai — a city that needs no introduction. I’ve been at CleverTap for just over 3 months. But how I got here is a long story.
I’ve archived my life before 21, but if I had to, I’d summarize my “humble beginnings” as colorless. I mean, sure, I learnt an instrument, got certified in music from Trinity College, London, and I graduated in Business Management, but I was socially awkward throughout. And then, I aged – something for which I still resent life. But it is what it is.
While my near and dear ones insisted that I was a “bright kid,” I wasn’t sure how to leverage my intelligence. And so, in the first five years or so of my life post college, I was quite a rolling stone, I explored jobs in advertising, sales, and (music) education.
In the merchant navy, I served on the deck crew of Ore Belo Horizonte, a 200,000-tonne iron ore carrier that sails between China and Brazil through the Cape of Good Hope. So, effectively, I’ve sailed the southern hemisphere of the earth, twice. (Flex!) And although I felt like I was built for the sea, the isolation got to me, and I decided to find my footing on land instead.
I eventually worked as a journalist, before hitting a dead end when Deccan Chronicle (DC) declared insolvency in 2019 and I lost my editorial chair. However, during my stint at DC, I grew obsessed with linguistic precision. So, I continued looking for editorial jobs in Mumbai, and that is when I landed a role at the (now defunct) EdTech Lido Learning.
There, somehow, I managed to shake off my social awkwardness and made friends with the product design team. They seemed cool. Fast forward a couple of months, word spread that I had a talent for expressing complex ideas with simplicity, and that is when I was offered my first opportunity as a UX writer. Soon after, I realized I had found my “fix,” and the rest is history.
In March 2020 (in the middle of the pandemic), I moved to Bengaluru — also known as India’s Silicon Valley — to work on the product design team at Groww. Let me clarify – I wasn’t asked to move. I chose to. To hit ‘refresh’ after living locked down in the confines of my bedroom for a year.
It was a solid decision. Bengaluru is where my eyes were opened to the wonders of tech, and the possibilities that it enables. During my time away, I collaborated with some of the smartest people I have ever known, learned more than I had in the rest of my life before this, and grew as a person and professional. And here we are.
In my humble opinion, UX writing resides at the intersection of language, problem solving, and psychology – three very keen interests of mine.
I consider myself a natural problem solver, because life is one big problem and I’ve cracked that code rather well (among other things). Further, at around 19, in an attempt to reconcile with my existential angst, I started searching the internet for reassurance about my idiosyncrasies. And while I never particularly managed to find a definitive answer to my woes, I learned to empathize with people on a deeper level. And in Bengaluru, as I was exposed to the wonders of tech, I learned to leverage the power of technology to empower people and businesses.
So far, I have collaborated with teams in India, San Francisco, and the UAE; launched a fintech product in the UAE, and nearly launched a food-tech product in the USA before the ongoing funding winter set in. It’s been a helluva ride!
I love challenges, they keep me engaged. A little over 18 months on the product design team at Groww, I found myself yearning for a bigger challenge. That is when a Talent Acquisition team member from CleverTap reached out to me with an opportunity on CleverTap’s product design team.
As a UXer with experience primarily in the B2C domain, CleverTap’s dashboard caught my attention as the challenge I was looking for. And after talking to the stakeholders I was going to be working with, I knew that CleverTap is where I wanted to be.
Like I’ve mentioned earlier in this piece, it’s been a little over 3 months since I came onboard, but I’m so grateful to the team for being so welcoming, inclusive, and pleasantly collaborative.
I want you to know that I do what I do because I love tech, and I look forward to working and learning together — and adding value to our endeavors — now and in the future. We’re just getting started, and we have a long road ahead of us. And I’m thrilled!
Ready to help build the future of mobile? Check out the career opportunities at CleverTap.
