When I first started, there was not much definition to my role. Over time, I have grown to have a fair idea of how this role contributes to the organization. My job is to actively look for areas in the organization that require improvement. Initially,...
People and Culture
Recent Articles
Lighthouse Fireside chat with Siji Varghese: Balancing the wheel and other life lessons
How would you define yourself with a prefix? Talkative, fun-loving, socially awkward, hansmukh, creative… These were just some ways in which Crayons described themselves. In an internal Lighthouse Fireside chat on 17 June...
Sheryl Chong on a StratOps traineeship filled with empathy, data and culture
In my 6 months as a Strategic Operations trainee at Crayon Data, I would not be exaggerating if I said that every day was a learning experience. My entire team was kind with their teachings, generous in their support and exceptional in the camaraderie we...
From the Drawing Board: Dinesh Kumar, UI Engineer
I believe that if you want to emulate the people around you, you shouldn’t emulate their liberties. Emulate the behavior that earned them those liberties. That’s why ‘Responsibility with Freedom’ is my favorite Crayon Data value. Perfection through peer review It’s...
With gratitude, as Crayon turns 9
Crayon Data turns 9 today, and we have plenty to be grateful about. In a note to our Crayons, founder and CEO Suresh V Shankar and co-founder and COO Aarti Ramakrishnan look back with gratitude for the year that was. In many cultures and religions, the number 9 has...
Vidhyashankar Sriram joins Crayon Data as Vice President – Client Solutions
Vidhyashankar Sriram has joined Crayon Data as Vice President - Client Solutions. In his new role, he will lead value delivery for our clients. An alumnus of NITIE Mumbai and Madras Institute of Technology, Vidhyashankar is a true-blue banker. He comes with over 15...
From the Drawing Board: Shruthi Viswanathan, Data Engineer
Since I joined Crayon during the pandemic, I haven’t had the opportunity to meet all my teammates in person. But I have come to know them as super enthusiastic, very supportive and helpful. They’re always ready to help even when they are busy. Don’t ask me to pick a...
Lighthouse Fireside Chat on mental health with Manoj Chandran: Create psychological safe spaces for yourself
Manoj Chandran of White Swan Foundation (left) in conversation with the Crayon Data team On 20th May 2021, Manoj Chandran, CEO and founder of White Swan Foundation, joined Crayon's internal Lighthouse Fireside Chat to talk about the importance of mental health...
How I fought against the second wave of Covid-19
Date: 19th May, 2021 Source: Blogger (personal blog) Attention: This is my personal health information (PHI) experience that I wish to share with you with the intent that it may benefit someone directly or indirectly. Few of you have been aware that me and my family...
From the Drawing Board: Karunamoorthi S, UI Engineer
When I joined Crayon as a software engineer working on UI, I was excited to be part of a product-based company handling Big Data. What has kept me here, for close to six years is the employee-friendly environment. And the fact that I can learn something new...
From the Drawing Board: Vaishnavi Raman, Sales Operations Specialist
Being a part of revenue operations, every day has been a new experience. While working with numbers and identifying discrepancies, what was expected out of me was always clear. #TheMissionIsTheBoss. This is my favorite Crayon Value, because when you have a clear...
From the Drawing Board: Akshaya Sreedhar, Customer Solutions
In my role as a customer solutions and engagement manager, I enjoy spending time on both ends of a colorful spectrum. From product, logic and client business to sales, people and driving value. The grey area is so broad that you can...
Talented Tangrams: Sundara Raman engineers a smart irrigation system
Many of our Crayons are currently #AloneTogether, as they continue work from home. And some of them have come up with ingenious ways to help cope with the prolonged lockdown. Sundara Raman does so by taking on an interesting home project to help solve an age-old...
Dhanya Nageswaran, the Economics and Political Science major turned Product Marketing intern
Like everyone around the world, COVID-19 threw a wrench in my plans for 2021. As an Economics and Political Science major from Wellesley College, I never thought I would spend my senior spring interning for a Big Data and AI company at home in Singapore: two things I...
From the Drawing Board – Madhubala Gnanamoorthy, Data Engineer
Madhubala Gnanamoorthy describes her typical work-day as a data engineer at Crayon, shares some of her favorite data tools to work with and what Crayon value speaks to her the most. My workday usually starts at 9 AM. I catch up with my team to understand the priority...
From the Drawing Board – Vidhya Nair, Bazaar Lead
The best part of my role as Bazaar Lead at Crayon is that I get to collaborate with a lot of internal and external stakeholders. Bazaar is a key business vertical and driving its success is an organization- wide goal. Which makes working across teams a huge part of my...
From the Drawing Board – Deepti Agarwal, Junior Product Mananger
I’ve been very excited to learn about the analytics and data science that go behind personalizing choices for users. It has been a little challenging to get accustomed to the technology used and the way it works, coming from a non-tech background. But working at...
From the Drawing Board: Shanmugam Sathappan, Test Engineer
As a QA engineer in Crayon (where quality matters), I validate and investigate product development from end-to-end, with stringent processes in place. The customer delight which it brings keeps me going. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced here was when we...
From the Drawing Board: Maadhusri Ulaganathan, Customer Scientist
This week on the From the Drawing Board, we asked Crayon’s Maadhusri to write about her experience as a customer scientist: As a the new addition to the Crayon Box, I’m excited to do three things: Strategize the analytics side of business, Work with new...
Lighthouse Fireside Chat with Aliza Knox: nurture a relationship with your career
Aliza Knox spent four years getting an MBA from New York University simply because she wanted to use the newly built pool on their campus (which was only open to students). “I lived in Greenwich Village, and the existing pools were between the size of teacup...
From the Drawing Board -Malvika Elango, Customer Solutions Manager
What is the most exciting or challenging thing you’ve learned? Crayon has successfully built an environment that is conducive to learning. One, by giving us the freedom to explore multiple ways to solve a problem. And two, by adopting a flat organizational structure...
The importance of brilliant failures: Lighthouse Fireside Chat with Deepa Madhavan, PayPal
“When talking about your journey, it’s important to acknowledge the challenges and failures you faced along the way,” said Deepa Madhavan, as she sets the tone for the second Lighthouse Fireside Chat to mark International Women’s Day (IWD), earlier this week. ...
From the Drawing Board -Sundara Raghavan Sankaran, Solution Architect
What is the most exciting or challenging thing you've learned? Over the years, I've learned a lot on big data, machine learning, designing APIs and working with Cloud. Recently, I've started to work with a roadmap to deliver various features and capabilities. What is...
Lighthouse Fireside Chat with Dr. Gita Johar, Columbia Business School
For this week’s fireside chat, we were joined by Dr. Gita Johar, the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business and the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Columbia Business School. To celebrate the occasion of International Women’s Day (IWD), Dr. Johar shared...
From the Drawing Board – Kanimozhi U, Senior Data Scientist
Tell us about what you do at Crayon Data As a Senior Data Scientist, I’m involved in research and engineering, which includes formulating, suggesting, and managing data-driven projects geared towards the business's interests. I also stay informed about developments...
From the Drawing Board – Hemal Shah, Sales Engineer
What is the most exciting or challenging thing you've learned? Coming from a conventional service-based background, I found it the most difficult to adopt a product-first mindset when crafting solutions for our clients. Crayon has taught me to challenge the status quo...
From the Drawing Board – Akshaya Dupati, UI Engineer
What is the most exciting thing you've learned? As a newbie to the development team, learning about the tech we use was very exciting for me. I personally enjoyed working with React and Node. The learnings have enriched my technical knowledge and confidence in...
From the Drawing Board – Chinmoy Rajurkar, Junior Product Manager
What is the most exciting or challenging thing you've learned? You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I've heard this rather cheesy aphorism more than I can count, and for the longest time, I had trouble believing it. However, this rings...
From the Drawing Board – Arvind Kumar, UI Engineer
What is the most exciting thing you've learned? Our company’s vision is to simplify the world’s choices. And that requires us to break down complex problems into simple solutions (or choices) for end users. My role is to build intuitive user interfaces to simplify the...
From the drawing board – Rohit Ghosh, Business Development Specialist, APAC
What is the most exciting or challenging thing you've learned? The most challenging thing I’ve learned is to use predictive modelling techniques, data analytics and programming languages to investigate a leak in a foreign currency treasury from a large private bank...
From the drawing board – Saravana Hari Guru, Senior Software Engineer
What is the most exciting thing you've learned? I specialize in application backend development. I love that I get to explore big data technologies and different tech stacks. These include Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL databases and cloud services. The core of our product is...
From the drawing board – Harish MR, Customer Scientist
Learning curve - What is the most exciting thing you've learned? Crayon today is solving some of the most complicated and challenging problems out there. In an organization like Crayon, any outsider would perceive the learning curve to be steep. But once you get an...
From the drawing board – Ranjani, Content Writer
What is the most exciting thing you've learned? I feel like my journey at Crayon is one gigantic learning curve. I’m constantly learning something new. When I first joined in 2018, I had to forget everything I’d known about writing. Then relearn how to write within...
From the drawing board – Nijanthan Ravi, Data Engineer
What is the most exciting thing you've learned? As a Data Engineer in a fast-growing big data and AI company, I focus on building a scalable, efficient and cost-effective data pipeline framework. Crayon extensively uses cloud solution for its analytics, and I have...
From the drawing board – Pratyush Roy, VP of GTM
1. How has the sales process changed in a time of remote B2B selling? Enterprise sales cycles used to span 6-18+ months. With COVID-19 imposed travel restrictions, the situation is much worse. For Crayon, we’ve noticed the 3 key changes in the remote B2B selling...
From the drawing board – Edwin Francis
1. What is the most exciting thing you have learned? Learning to build scalable applications that impacts millions of users, using big data, has been one of the most exciting parts of working at Crayon Data. For instance, I recently designed and built a complex...
From the drawing board – Ajoy, Chief Business Officer
What is the biggest challenge faced by the retailers and merchant aggregators today? Covid-19 has accelerated adoption to digital and non-contact channels, shifted demand to small and local retailers, and changed the way we work and study. These are not temporary...
From the drawing board – Aarti Ramakrishnan, Chief Operating Officer
What's the most difficult aspect of managing a remote workforce? Building social equity. Those informal bonds and connects that happen over corridor conversations, cups of coffee, shared looks of empathy at a tough meeting, high fives after getting the job done -...
From the drawing board – Prateek Vyas, VP of Sales
How have sales conversations and pitches changed in a time of remote working? Life has been extra interesting since remote work started. Not that we have not worked remotely before, the difference now is that it’s full time and involuntary. The lack of travel and an...
"Don’t build in the conference room” – 6 practical tips on how to build a great product
In this week’s episode of the Crayon Lighthouse Fireside Chat, Krish Sridhar, founder and CEO of KNOW (getknowapp.com) talks to us about his company’s vision and how to build a great product. Krish has over ten years of experience in the corporate and consulting...
From the drawing board – Suresh Shankar, Founder and CEO of Crayon Data
People and product. Two P’s in a pod. The two things that make a company. Most marketing strategies focus on product marketing. While employer branding is seen as a separate thing altogether. At Crayon Data, we know our people make the product (in our case, our...
Lighthouse fireside chat with B.S Nagesh: Trends in consumer retail and ecommerce post-Covid-19
In this week’s Lighthouse Fireside Chat, B.S Nagesh, the founder of Trust for Retailers & Retail Associates of India (TRRAIN) and the Chairman of Shoppers Stop spoke to us about the changing retail landscape. Shoppers Stop is one of India’s largest department...
Crayons Of Lockdown – Bhavani Vishweshwar
In the newest edition of #CrayonsOfLockdown, we have another WFH veteran and the First Lady of Finance, Bhavani who talks about the highs and lows of working from home and gives us a sneak peek into her newly acquired skill. How does it feel to work from home on an...
Crayons Of Lockdown – Vijay Anand
In the newest edition of #CrayonsOfLockdown, we have WFH veteran, sales guru and part time gardener Vijay Anand who talks about his WFH experience and gives us a sneak peek into his newly acquired skill. How does it feel to work from home on an extended basis? Having...
Crayons Of Lockdown – Rohit Ghosh
How does it feel to work from home on an extended basis? I feel quite alright working from home - definitely feel more productive in terms of personal work and goals owned by me. However, it is a little difficult and inconvenient when I want to collaborate or discuss....
Life @ Crayon – Satwika
1) How long have you been at Crayon? I joined Crayon in 2017 and then went on a break and now it has been 5 months since I came back! 2) What do you do at Crayon? I ensure that every deliverable sent from my team is one that is the closest reflection of Crayon’s...
How to become a work-from-home warrior in the time of COVID-19 and beyond
Globally, 52% of people work from home at least once every week (according to Owl Labs). There are a number of good reasons why people choose to work from remote locations. They live in another city, they have kids to take care of, the commute is just too long, so...
Life @ Crayon – Vaibbahav
1) How long have you been at Crayon? I’ve been in Crayon for about 12 months. 2) What do you do at Crayon? I manage sales in the MENA region for Crayon. 3) What’s your average day like? I usually spend my days meeting CXOs of financial institutions and I try to solve...
Life @ Crayon – Akshaya Sreedhar
1) How long have you been at Crayon? I’m 16 months old at Crayon. 2) What do you do at Crayon? I’m a business analyst with the Customer Success Team. 3) What’s your average day like? My average day is filled with cross team meetings, client meetings, raising tickets...
Life @ Crayon – Karuna
1) How long have you been at Crayon? I’ve been at Crayon for 4 years and 3 months. 2) What do you do at Crayon? I’m a UI Developer. 3) What’s your average day like? My day is usually filled with movies, work, food and sleep. 4) What’s your favourite Crayon memory?...