Ola Electric has had a rough couple of months dealing with negative publicity around the after-sales performance of its scooters, and two of its senior-most executives have now stepped down from their positions.
Ola Electric’s Chief Technology Officer and Chief Marketing Officer have both resigned. Ola’s CTO was longtime Ola employee Suvonil Chatterjee, who had been with the company for six years. Ola’s CMO was Anshul Khandelwal, who’d joined the company in 2019. Ola did not comment on the exits.
Ola CTO Suvonil Chatterjee had previously worked with Housing.com and Flipkart as their Head of Design. In 2017, he’d joined Ola as its Head of Design, and had been promoted to its Chief Product Officer in 2021. Since 2022, he was serving as Ola Electric’s Chief Technology and Product Officer. Chatterjee was active on X and was often tagged in the company’s posts and announcements.
Ola CMO Anshul Khandelwal had been in marketing roles at BlueStone, Upgrad and Little Black Book, before joining Foodpanda in 2018 after it had been acquired by Ola. He’d then become the Head of Marketing at Ola Foods, before becoming Ola’s Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer. Since 2022, Khandelwal had been the Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer at Ola Electric.
Interestingly, Ola’s CTO and CMO had quit within days of each other in 2022 as well. Back then, Dinesh Radhakrishnan, who was Ola Electric’s CTO, had quit Ola, and Ola’s Chief Marketing Officer Varun Dubey had quit days later too citing personal reasons. Cut to two years later, and Ola Electric’s CTO and CMO have again quit nearly simultaneously. Earlier this year, Ola Cabs’ CEO had quit within 4 months of joining the company.
Ola has been known to have an intense work culture, and has seen plenty of churn in its senior roles. Just last week, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal had sent a letter to his staff pulling up people with “poor attendance”. “I would imagine everyone has the basic self-respect to not fleece the company by not even turning up for work. It’s even disrespectful to those colleagues who genuinely work hard and contribute. And we don’t have any WFH policy except for genuine needs,” he had said. And with the company facing challenges in scaling its scooter offerings, and incumbents like Bajaj breathing down its neck, Ola will need to quickly scout for senior talent as it looks to hold its ground in India’s e-scooter space.