January 10, 2022

Weekly Roundup - Issue #14

On the first working day of 2022, I resigned from my job as a senior design manager at Gojek. The four years that I spent there were immensely memorable filled with lots of great projects & awesome people.

Back in 2017, when I was looking for my next gig, Noopur sent me this tweet from Abhinit and I cold DM’d him and the rest is history.

That was back when Gojek had just 1.5 floors occupied in the Diamond District building(and 2 floors in the Pasaraya building in Jakarta) and roughly 20-25 designers. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we barely had any space free in our 4-ish floors of the Diamond District building(4 floors in Pasaraya too) and around a 100+ designers. When I left last week, there were around 160 designers in the team across six different specializations.

In the early days, there was no certainty that the projects we worked on would see the light of day..infact the first one I designed got shelved and picked up much after I had moved onto another team. The new team that I joined was just being created out of M&As that had recently occurred. We called it ‘GoMerchants’ internally. Unlike other product teams at that time, this team owned multiple products. This was an exciting time for this team and I felt I was at the right place at the right time.

A merchant using our device during an immersion study 🙇🏻‍♂️

We built the unified merchant app, GoBiz, and launched it in two other countries. We did immersion studies and merchant AMAs to understand the various merchant archetypes. We worked on EDC machine flows, POS flows, Food order flows, Web dashboards and a lot of self-onboarding flows. We did usability studies and bug bashes before releasing products. But it wasn’t always smooth. There were changing priorities, team re-orgs that moved people & products around leading to broken links and complex internal policies to name a few. But the people that you worked with made the difference. For the longest time, I was the only designer sitting in India working on that vertical. But I never felt left out. The folks who came from Midtrans, especially Maji, were vital to my journey within Gojek. They made me feel at home. It truly felt like a place that I could be myself. Every visit I made it a point to meet people I had only interacted on Slack/Zoom in person. Every visit, we bonded over pop culture, food and art.

Japanese food was a great unifier 🍜

Gojek was the place where I felt the urge to transition into a managerial role. Nothing really prepares you for that transition. All these years I’d been spending time honing my design chops but suddenly I realized the gaps in my skillset. It was so easy to use your 1:1s to talk about status reports instead of having a meaningful conversation. It was so easy to shy away from showcasing your work to major stakeholders. It was so easy to not care and take your role for granted. But these people were my friends and I didn’t want to let them down. Yes, I made quite a few mistakes, but I learnt from them. I learnt how to write promotion packets, conduct performance reviews and run retros. I learnt how to plan team growth and design team rituals.

The farewell zoom 👋🏽

Whatever I achieved at Gojek, I owe it to the people I got to work with and I will always feel proud for being a tiny part of this team’s journey ✨

Thank you! 💚