Snigdha Singh Takes On Tata Digital's Culture Rebuild
Tata Digital is rebuilding itself around profit, loyalty and financial services, and it has just hired the person to build the team that pulls it off.
Snigdha Singh has been named Chief Human Resources Officer of the Tata Group's digital arm, moving across from Tata Consumer Products, where she was Vice President for HR.
She reports to CEO and Managing Director Sajith Sivanandan, and steps into one of the more consequential HR seats in Indian consumer tech, owning the culture and talent of the company behind the Tata Neu super-app.
A rebuild, not a coronation
Snigdha is the third senior hire in two months, arriving alongside Rajesh Naik as Chief Technology Officer and Chandramouli Gopalakrishnan as Chief Product Officer.
Since taking charge in September, Sajith, a former Google and Jio executive, has put Tata Digital through its third major reset, steering it away from chasing gross merchandise value at any cost and towards turning a profit.
"Our endeavour at Tata Neu is to simplify how customers fulfil their financial and lifestyle needs through a trusted and frictionless digital experience," says Sajith of the new direction.
The delivery has cost jobs, with around 250 roles cut so far and reports of far deeper reductions to come at Tata Neu.
For Snigdha, at Tata Consumer Products, she ran organisation effectiveness, culture, CSR and employee relations, the unglamorous side of HR that decides whether a workforce holds together at all.
She is also a Tata insider, which for a group that treats its culture as an asset worth protecting is a deliberate pick rather than a convenient one.
The hardest brief in Indian tech
Tata Neu is the group's bet on the Indian super-app, a single door to groceries, flights, electronics and financial services, and it is fighting Reliance's JioMart and Walmart-owned Flipkart for customers and engineers at the same time.
Sajith has recast the company around three priorities, financial services, marketing services and a single loyalty programme stitched across the Tata Group.
Every one of them is a talent problem before it is a technology one, and the "trusted and frictionless" experience he wants is a hiring brief as much as a product roadmap.
That is where Snigdha earns her seat. A push into financial services needs compliance and risk specialists the consumer arm never had to hire, and a group-wide loyalty engine only works if Tata's many brands agree to pull together.
Snigdha joins a workforce that, across the wider Tata Group, numbers roughly 1.1 million, though her immediate world is the few thousand who build and run Tata Neu.
In a market where the biggest names are cutting and hiring in the same breath, the company that rebuilds its culture fastest tends to win the next round.
