Shippr was my first real job. An early-stage logistics startup doing last-mile delivery for Amazon and Flipkart. Eighteen people in the office. Eighty-plus delivery executives across Bangalore and Hyderabad. 370K+ orders every month.
I joined as Project Manager and within the first week realized the company was running on instinct. No SOPs. No structured reporting. No clear picture of where money was being made or lost. Everyone worked hard. Nobody could tell you which part of the operation was bleeding.
What I actually managed
The scope was broader than the title suggested. I managed a team of 5 executives handling operations and customer success. Owned the full P&L and reconciled numbers for regular audits. Worked directly with Amazon and Flipkart as the primary client contact. All communication between clients and CEO went through me.
When Flipkart needed a process change for a seasonal sale, they called me. When the CEO needed delivery performance numbers for a client review, he asked me. I expected to manage internal processes. I ended up managing client relationships, team performance, and financial reporting at the same time.
Finding the leak
The company knew it was losing money. That wasn't news. But the assumption was that losses were spread across everything: fleet waste, delays, damage, routing errors. A general "operations need to improve" sentiment with no specific target.
I started tracking everything. Excel for internal numbers. Analytics pulled from Amazon and Flipkart's client portals. Nothing sophisticated. Just stubborn consistency. I logged every loss I could identify, categorized by type and route, and tracked it week over week.
The data told a simple story. Damaged shipments and misrouted packages were the dominant cost leak. Not fleet idle time. Not fuel. Not staffing. Products getting broken in the warehouse and packages ending up on the wrong truck.
That moment is the thing I come back to when I think about this role. The problems were there the whole time. They became solvable the moment they became visible.
Systems and behavior
The fix had two parts.
The systems part was straightforward. I redesigned the warehouse layout. Fragile items got dedicated storage instead of being mixed with everything else. Every shipment got tracked from arrival through sorting to outgoing delivery. I put the ops team on a responsibility rotation so each person worked every segment: incoming, sorting, outgoing, delivery coordination. Before the rotation, people only knew their piece. After it, everyone could spot problems anywhere in the chain.
The behavior part was harder. Ground staff treated damaged shipments as an inevitability. Packages break, that's logistics. I needed them to see every damaged or missing shipment as money walking out the door.
I didn't do this with a training deck. I did it through repetition during daily operations. When a shipment arrived damaged, we calculated the cost on the spot. When a package was misrouted, we traced it back to the sorting step. The goal was to make the cost feel immediate, not abstract.
It took weeks. But once the shift happened, the team started catching errors before they became losses. A sorting mistake that would have sent 40 packages to the wrong city got flagged by someone who six weeks earlier wouldn't have noticed.
This is the thing I learned at Shippr that I've carried into every role since: process changes create conditions. Behavior changes create results. You need both, but if you only have time for one, change the behavior.
Seasonal stress tests
Amazon and Flipkart run multi-day high-discount sales where order volume spikes dramatically. These events broke every process weakness at 3x speed. Sorting backed up. Error rates spiked. Delivery windows tightened.
I adapted the workflow for each sale. Adjusted staffing. Changed sorting priorities for high-volume SKUs. Coordinated directly with client teams on expectations.
The events were stressful, but they were also the best feedback loops I had. Every weakness surfaced under load. Fixes made after each spike improved baseline operations permanently. The best month of normal performance always came right after a seasonal event.
What this role was really about
Losses dropped 30% over 8 months. Revenue grew 18%. Both from reduced waste and better process efficiency, not from new clients or higher volume.
But the numbers aren't the point of this note. Shippr taught me two things that shaped how I work.
First: data doesn't fix problems. Visibility does. The Excel tracking wasn't a sophisticated analytics platform. It was a person categorizing losses by type and route, every week, consistently. But that simple act changed the conversation from "operations need to improve" to "misrouted packages on the Hyderabad route cost us X last month." Specificity drives action. Generality drives meetings. This is the same instinct that later led me to build SQL dashboards at Paytm and stand up a full metrics layer at ShopX. The tools got better. The principle stayed the same.
Second: client management is product management. Amazon and Flipkart each had specific requirements for delivery timelines, packaging standards, and reporting formats. Adapting our operations to meet their expectations was the same skill as building a product for a user. Understand what they need. Adjust the system. Deliver consistently. I didn't realize it at the time, but the client management work at Shippr was my first product management experience, even though the title said Project Manager.
Why I left
After a year, I wanted to work somewhere more tech-oriented. Shippr was a logistics company that used technology. I wanted to work at a technology company that solved business problems through product. The operational instinct I built here carried into every role after. But the role itself had a ceiling for what I wanted to learn next.
That led me to ShopX, where the product was digital and the growth challenge was about users, not packages.
Shippr was my first role out of college. The instinct I built here, making problems visible through data, fixing systems before blaming people, treating every loss as money, became the foundation for the product and growth work I did later.