Wayfair growth mantra for India GCC: Focus on both new and experienced talent
Ecommerce platform Wayfair’s India GCC sped up the process of building deep technology capabilities, thereby making important contributions to the company in a shorter period of time.
Global capability centres (GCC) have become the strategic hubs for technology companies looking to drive product development and research, in step with talent development, in India. However, GCCs are not quick fixes. It takes time for a company to achieve maturity that can drive genuine innovation.
However, US-headquartered Wayfair took only two years to turn its India GCC in Bengaluru into an important contributor to their operations. The online home decor and furniture retailer established its GCC in India in April 2023.
“We decided to come here (India) and go all in to leapfrog from that learning curve to become a microcosm of Wayfair,” Rohit Kaila, head of technology and site leader, Wayfair India TDC tells EnterpriseStory.
Wayfair did not take the conventional route of appointing a senior executive and then hiring junior-level engineers en masse. The ecommerce company rather first hired more than a dozen senior-level engineers forming its core leadership team before expanding the team.
According to Kaila, Wayfair’s India technology development centre did not restrict work activity to a particular domain and was engaged in all business aspects of the parent company.
Wayfair typically has technology operations in locations such as the US and Canada where it has business, but its approach to India was a bit different. Here, Wayfair wanted to tap into the talent pool in the software domain, boasting a combination of engineering expertise as well as domain knowledge. Its entry was buoyed by other global retail companies like Walmart, Target, Lowe’s, and Amazon that had already established their GCCs in India.
According to Kaila, Wayfair’s India GCC employee strength constitutes more than a fourth of the organisation’s headcount and is engaged in all functions, be it product development and management, user experience, design, data science, and engineering.
“We are reasonably independent in terms of functioning and report to the leadership team of Wayfair,” remarks Kaila.
Wayfair wanted to create an environment that enabled employees to try new things. It gave senior employees a sense of stability while providing the younger engineers with a platform to experiment. “We are a combination of a startup and a big company,” remarks Kaila.
Today, Wayfair India is closely integrated with the parent company’s operations. The India GCC was instrumental in building its supply chain platform. Similarly, communications and cataloguing functions are also being driven from India.
Kaila emphasises that Wayfair’s technology priorities are very dynamic where there is a change every six months and the India team is very much clued into it. “Whatever the company decides is the key technology area we will focus on that,” he says.
One of these priorities, as with every company, is tapping into the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) and GenAI. This means keeping up with the latest technology developments as well as scouting for talent.
Kaila finds no dearth of AI talent in India and the younger generation is extremely aware of the latest trends. “We also provide every developer with code generation tools,” he added.
The India GCC segment is expected to reach a market size of $105 billion by 2030 from the level of $64.6 billion in 2024, according to a report by Nasscom and Zinnov.
As part of its future plans, Wayfair’s idea of growth does not necessarily focus on increasing the headcount but on improving developer productivity and increasing efficiency. “We are focused on building senior talent and also want to induct people who have the business expertise,” Kaila notes.
In the last two years, Wayfair India GCC has achieved a certain level of maturity and as Kaila put it, “Probably we are there where most of the GCCs get it after four to five years.”
Edited by Kanishk Singh