Hello, everyone! I’m Kayo from the Engineering Office.

I am currently working at Mercari’s Tokyo office, but I’m also in charge of Employer Branding for Mercari India, which was established last year in Bengaluru as our first Global Center of Excellence.

In this article, I would like to provide a brief update on Mercari India and Mercari India members’ first business trip to Tokyo.

About 8 months since Mercari India started hiring

Mercari established Mercari India, a Global Center of Excellence in Bengaluru, India, in the summer of 2022 to recruit the tech talent necessary to achieve our group mission of “Circulate all forms of value to unleash the potential in all people.”

It has been about eight months since then, and Mercari India now has several teams of engineers. In February of this year, Mercari India also announced the appointment of its first-ever Site Lead, Vish Magapu.

In the early days of the start-up, many Mercari employees from the Japan office traveled to the India office, but with the increase in the number of Mercari India members and teams, Indian members began to plan business trips to Japan as well.

Why face-to-face communication is so important despite remote work being the norm

Mercari Japan and Mercari India TnS Team at the Tokyo Office

Since the Mercari India project was launched, many members from Japan have visited the Mercari India office on business trips. I personally have visited Bengaluru five times since Mercari India was launched last year. There are several reasons why the Mercari India project team encourages face-to-face communication among Mercari members.

First, because Mercari India is a very new organization, there is a great deal of information that needs to be shared about the company culture and structure. Mercari Tokyo members also need to not only onboard the new members who they work with, but to meet all the other people who work there, as well.

In Japan, there are many members who have been onboarded remotely over the years, with Mercari having established a proper system for online onboarding There is no such system at Mercari India yet, however. This means that there are very many situations where face-to-face communication is necessary. For this reason, engineers living in Japan have also been visiting the India office to conduct onboarding.

The second reason is that by actually visiting each other’s countries, we can get a better feel for the business and organizational situations firsthand. Currently, many tools are used to exchange information remotely, so a certain amount of information can be conveyed, but there are many new insights to be gained by actually visiting the country and seeing the members and the office. One of the major differences between Japan and India is the level of recognition that the Mercari service enjoys. In Japan, the service has already been in use for nearly 10 years, but in India, the organization is new and the service itself is not in use. When engineers from Japan visit the Indian office, they will notice things that are present in the Japanese office but not in the Indian office, and when Indian members visit Japan, they will be able to see the Mercari Post installed in convenience stores, for example, and interact with non-development members working in the office to get a multifaceted view of the service itself.

This is why all of us working on the Mercari India launch project encourage face-to-face communication.

Mercari India members on a business trip to Tokyo

This time, four Mercari India members from two different teams came to Tokyo on a business trip. For some of them, it was their first overseas business trip. Because of the differences in transportation and food culture between Japan and India, the members of the team found themselves relying on each other as they prepared for their stay in Japan.

During their stay in Tokyo, members of the team who had been working mainly online gathered at the Tokyo office to work on their regular duties and also interacted extensively with members of other related teams through team-building activities. Especially in the first few days, the Indian team members may have been a bit tired from the continuous team-building activities.

For the members who joined Mercari India in the early days of the company, I feel that this trip was a particularly valuable experience for them to actually experience firsthand the level of recognition Mercari enjoys in Japan and to meet directly with other members working in the Tokyo office. I think there is a big difference in both quantity and quality between the information you can get online and the information you can get by actually going there.

Weekend Photo in Tokyo！

I spoke with a member who actually visited the Tokyo office and the team manager who had that team member join from Mercari India. Anandha is a senior software engineer from the TnS team at Mercari India and Keigo is an Engineering Manager on Growth Platform Team at Mercari Japan.

Slack post during Mercari India Tokyo business trip

Since Mercari India is still new, we hope to further accelerate collaboration within Mercari Group through initiatives like these. I hope you enjoyed this look at Mercari India members’ first business trip to Tokyo!

Mercari India continues to recruit engineers. Please apply through the career site below. We look forward to hearing from you!
Mercari India Careers

For the latest information on Mercari India, please visit our corporate website and follow us on social networking sites!
Mercari India Corporate