Open work culture, constant innovations drive this company towards the finish line

After the pandemic brought all sporting activity to a halt, it was a major challenge for sports technology company Dream Sports that piggy rides popular sporting events to generate its worldwide business. Major global sports events, including Japan 2020 Olympics, were put off and later held in July-August this year.

For Dream Sports, this meant a temporary lull before it strategized and used the period to shore up its gaming technology and its interplay with data-driven engineering, artificial intelligence, and analytics and built up its technical team for upping its game when sporting activity opened up. Even during the pandemic, Dream Sports went on a hiring spree and doubled its headcount, and continues to expand its team as business picked up.

During the pandemic, Dream Sports invested heavily in technology and manpower, and spent on training and empowerment of its employees. Kevin Freitas, CHRO, Dream Sports, said, “We continued to invest in technology expertise, ramped up our teams, and came up with disruptive solutions for seamless sports engagement, in preparing for the time sports events bounced back.”

A process of HEAL and banishing’ HiPPO
No individual or organisation can grow if they do the same thing over and over again. To sustain and grow, organisations have to learn, implement and innovate. Dream Sports follows a hyper-experimentation that is based on HEAL – Hypothesis, Experiment, Analysis, and Learning’, Freitas said and added, everything at Dream Sports or Dream11 is run through the HEAL process, which makes the team “fail fast, learn fast and build unique features for the users.?’

Freitas told ETHRWorld that they have an open work culture concept at Dream Sports, where even the newest and youngest members are free to raise their voice and concerns whether for personal or professional development. The organisation motivates its employees to share their thoughts and feedback instead of following the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

Dream Sports is a highly culture-driven company that fosters an employee-focused, transparent, in-person, and open culture.

Freitas said, “We follow our five culture pillars ‘DO-PUT’ that stands for Data-obsessed, Ownership, high Performance, User first, and Transparency, and we keep encouraging Sportans (our employees) to DO PUT our culture first.”

“As a data-obsessed organisation, we have democratized data and its analytics to the extent that everyone at Dream Sports, irrespective of their level, can plan, test, or experiment features backed by data. The decisions and changes are implemented based on discussions, surveys, and feedback from all Sportans. That is quite unique in our work culture where people challenge the status quo day-in-day-out and make room for innovation,” he added.

Besides this, the company also encourages its employees to pursue their dreams and goals beyond their work commitments, especially in a city like Mumbai that has so much to offer its residents. The array of offerings includes unlimited leaves, ESOP grants, conveyance, gym membership, exceptional health and wellness benefits for Sportans and their families, international offsite, and the like.

Strong belief in talent & technology
Dream Sports used technology extensively during the pandemic. The organisation uses ‘Lever’ that combines an application tracking and relationship management system for building better relationships with candidates; LinkedIn, Zoom, and Calendar integrations to manage hybrid interviews and speed up the hiring process; HackerRank and OnGrid for filtering and background verifications that address talent and build trust; Monday.com and Slack integrations to get a quick and overall sense of the recruiting playbook, so that it can efficiently respond to referral candidates; and Woohoo for the gratification of referral awards.

During the lockdown, the Dream Sports team quickly adapted to newer ways of working and continued to efficiently work remotely, with the support of technology, especially during big league events. During events like the IPL, the teams adopted a hybrid model wherein a few Sportans were physically present in the war room, while others worked over Zoom calls and used breakout rooms to ensure a seamless user experience during live matches.

Since it is a data-driven company, a culture of experimentation and being trained for that is critical for the team. For core tasks, the organisation builds in-house solutions and has scaled platform solutions, big data ecosystem, innovative custom business solutions, etc that they leverage.

The organisation also tries to curate training for the team members in skills that will help them further excel in its tool stack, which includes Distributed Systems technologies using Java, Scala, AKKA Kafka, SQL, and NoSQL Database Technologies (MySQL, VoltDB, Cassandra, Aerospike, etc), Spark, RedShift, ML Platforms, and more. The training specifically focuses on Scale, Resiliency, and Performance with a lot of strong emphasis on Security.

Employees also get a learning wallet benefit besides the training sessions that are held frequently. Towards the end of last year, they also sent selected team members to London for an immersive training session with Scala.

Team expansion
Dream Sports currently has a team of 800 people across all brands, including Dreaml1, FanCode, Dream Capital. The company has more than doubled its staff strength since January 2020 when it had a headcount of 339.

Freitas said that at Dream Sports, culture is central to everything they do and believes that it is the only thing that matters in an organisation.

“We hire great people; ensure they are culture-fit and move out of their way so they can perform at their best. Currently, the primary focus in hiring for the next couple of months is to rapidly scale up the teams in our core productivity functions of technology, product, and design,” he said.

Apart from experienced professionals, the organisation is on the lookout for top talent across the country, provided they make for a potentially good fit for the Dream Sports’ culture. The company scouts for such talent through referrals from the existing Sportans and also from reputed institutes such as IITs, NIITs.

Initially, the organisation believed in hiring experienced people who can help in building what they wanted to build. But over the years, as it expanded, the organisation also started hiring freshers and putting them alongside experienced people who can help them grow. According to the company, this helps the freshers imbibe the work ethos and once they understand the culture, they are encouraged to work on their own and be creative with technology.