COMPANY

When I joined Gojek as their Global Head of Design, it was Southeast Asia’s leading on-demand superapp and Indonesia’s first and fastest growing decacorn. Gojek is kind of like Uber on motorbikes combined with UberEats, embedded mobile payment systems, logistics and on-demand platform for B2B. We were buying around one company per month.

Need a massage, tires, transportation, food, something from hundreds of thousands of stores, your entire house contents moved? Gojek delivers all of it. It was and continues to be the operating system of Indonesia with services in Vietnam and Singapore.

In 2022 Gojek became part of the GoTo Group IPO ($40B*) forming the largest technology company in Indonesia representing 2% of GDP for the 5th largest country in the world with operations extending to Singapore and Vietnam. 

​The Gojek app (1B+ downloads) represents:

• Pro forma orders of ~2 billion annually
• 55+ million annual transacting users (ATU)
• 2.5+ million registered driver partners
• 14+ million registered merchants

GoTo Group is the equivalent of a merger between Uber (Gojek), PayPal (GoPay/GoTo Financial) and Amazon (Tokopedia).

MY ROLE

​Global Head of Design 

• Managed design teams through Gojek’s IPO, overseeing 175+ specialists, designers and creatives.
• Led business, brand and product-focused initiatives, improving execution speed and business metrics.
• Spearheaded large-scale organizational changes and best practices for design team across 20+ BUs.
• Built a Design Studio, Innovation Accelerator and Creative Council to connect leaders across teams.
• Mentored and developed senior design leaders as part of managing 20+ VPs, Sr. Directors & Directors.

GOJEK DESIGN TEAM ​

The Gojek Design Team consisted of 175+ designers across four countries with 7 centralized teams and 13 embedded consumer-facing product design teams (grouped into 4 clusters: mobility, consumer superapp, food & entertainment, partner platform). I spun off part of this team to create GoTo Financial & GoPay design teams. (PDGs are product design groups for the core apps - Indonesians love acronyms it turns out:)

ORG CHALLENGES

How to support creation and execution of a new company? (GoTo Financial - think PayPal)

• Asked by CEO to develop visual identity and branding for a new company (GoTo Financial) providing consumer & B2C financial services.
• With limited resources, staff new product teams in GoTo Financial to design and develop the GoPay app (think PayPal).

How to respond to opex requirements for restructuring? 

• Product and business leads pushed to embed resources on teams.
• Previously this had caused significant issues including:
  • Inconsistency & lack of collaboration across teams.
  • Isolation and lack of career dev. Top talent leaving the company.
• Asked to manage complex dependencies & shifting budgets.

 HOW DOES GOJEK FEEL? VIEW ON VIMEO >>

LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES

Lack of consistency across product & marketing 

• Brand positioning and mission not part of company/team DNA.
• Disjointed marketing & product experiences with silo’d teams.
• UX Research findings not actionable for design and product.

Lack of thought leadership & advocacy for user experience (across the company)

• ​Culture of speed & execution created a linear production line process minimizing the potential for game-changing product innovations.
• Design managers weren’t considered business leaders or thought partners by their product counterparts.
  
• Research not empowered to address general usability issues across the customer’s end-to-end journey.

​WHAT I DID

1. Unified The Fragmented Brand & Inconsistent Messaging
   Built a Creative Council: Brand unification, refined visual identity defined regional positioning, aligned mission/essence (Brand Pyramid).
   
   
2. Spearheaded Innovation Through Creation of A Design Studio
   Launched Gojek Studio: Accelerated & elevated key projects including groceries, merchant services, logistics, food, global search.
   
   
3. Launched & Branded New Companies To Enable Powerful Execution
   Spearheaded creation of a new company: GoTo Financial 
   
   
4. Drove Business Thinking Focusing On Measurable Impact For Design
   Turn design leaders into business leaders (through QBR Impact: Design Exec Summaries, QBR, integrate design+business objectives in OKRs)
   
   
5. Accelerated Customer-Centered Innovation
   Drove progressive engagement as a personalization strategy to drive retention.
   ​
6. Created A Culture Obsessed With Craft & Excellence
   Promoted the kaizen model for continuous, incremental improved demonstrated through impact of motion design, UX writing, illustration.​

TASK

​Unify and elevate the primary parent brand and make the Gojek logo as recognizable as the Nike swoosh.

Creative Council: I formed a Creative Council to connect marketing, product, design and corporate communications. I spearheaded work to integrate market insights and align stakeholders on new positioning and brand attributes. I built alignment across the C-suite and launched the brand updates and visual identity changes.
​
Design Leadership: As the design leader, I actively translate the brand strategy and product goals into actionable and measurable goals (OKRs) for the design team. I mentor and guide my senior leaders to be better managers, business leaders and thought partners.

Visual Identity & Positioning: Building consensus for change across a large fragmented, business-driven organization required that I start from visual identity which my team owned. Proposing updates to the logos, templates and eventually messaging was the optimal path to guide stakeholders into more challenging discussions about emotional and functional benefits and the positioning of the company.

The visual identity map below was the starting point presented to help stakeholders understand the competitive landscape and the brand positioning from a visual identity perspective.

BRANDING FRAGMENTATION

BEFORE    Hybrid House of Brands / Endorsed

Fragmentation of the visual identity was an indicator suggesting there might be underlying issues with the end-to-end experience and seamless connections between marketing and products.

​Gojek maintained distinct sub-brands (like in a house of brands), while still leveraging the parent brand’s identity or equity (like in a branded house) where it makes strategic sense. In some cases the sub-brands would be endorsed (e.g., by Gojek) to link back to the parent brand. This approach led to brand fragmentation and weakened the association with the parent brand (Gojek).

Each property was run as a separate business unit with little attention to coherence or shared patterns across properties. Given the massive scale of teams and their separate roadmaps, the only real "way in" to solve this problem was by addressing visual identity and messaging - the easiest to change elements and those controlled by design - as a first step. However, this required working closely with marketing which was an entirely different organization.

BRAND MARKETING DESIGN ISSUES

BEFORE    No clear hierarchy or relationship between brands

There were numerous visual design problems with the marketing design patterns: illegible endorsements, no common design codes and lots of visual noise. In many cases, there would be multiple endorsements (GoFood, GoPay, Gojek) all using different design codes, icon sizes, fonts and sizes (right).

Marketing and design collaborated on these with design owning many of the visual codes and marketing controlling the creative. There was friction in terms of who owned the templates and the teams worked together to create these. However marketing was also fragmented with independent leads for each property choosing whether to follow the templates or invent new ones.

 WHAT I DID: UNIFY THE BRANDS

AFTER       I created a Unified Branded House with common design codes
​

• Improved clarity, consistency - increase brand equity.
• Reduced associated with building brand recognition and marketing.
• Product marketing for specific sub-brands lent maximum brand equity to the other sub-brands.
• ​No fixed rules or templates, but clear building blocks and guidelines to balance consistency with creativity.
  

BEFORE: House of Brands / Endorsed - silo’d sub brands disconnected from parent brand (Gojek).

AFTER: Branded House - Unified brand architecture through consistent visual identity.

BEFORE & AFTER EXAMPLES BY PROPERTY

GoFood (before)

GoSend (before)

GoFood (after)

GoSend (after)

GoCar-GoRide (before)

GoCar-GoRide (after)

IMPACT

1. 6% increase in parent brand recognition in association with sub-brands for co-branded advertisements
2. 11% increase in legibility scores from comparative user testing
3. 3% increase in brand association of Gojek logo with Gojek brand (already high)

This update strengthened the Gojek parent brand and simplified the elements used in marketing, increasing brand recall.

MINI CASE STUDY: DRIVING IMPACT THROUGH DATA & CRAFT
​
P1: Fix basic usability and design issues with the home screen
Metrics: Repeat engagement & retention

​​Redesign driven by performance data, usability research & ergonomics of single hand screen usage.

Results:

1. 4% increase in users' rating for the overall quality of the app.
2. 3% increase in usage of global search (already high)
3. No change to conversion, engagement or retention

We had been showing 40 cards below the fold. We reduced these to 10 cards and still no change in overall conversion, engagement or retention metrics. I used this data to empower the design team to become more emboldened in their experiments and to pursue more radical changes.

​Over time the suggested shortcuts reached the highest engagement and retention scores (~72% engagement vs. other items and ~10% higher retention for users tapping suggested shortcuts / repeat orders - because these attracted high frequency, repeat users).

The reason we were able to move the needle in this scenario (and across the board) was in part due to my larger initiative to turn design leaders into business partners so they could work more effectively with their product and business counterparts. 

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TURNING DESIGN LEADERS INTO BUSINESS PARTNERS

CHALLENGE: Design team was disconnected from business metrics and outcomes

• Limited understanding of business models , metrics and growth strategies
• Design leaders not empowered to participate in creation of customer-centered OKRs
• OPPORTUNITY: Desire from product team for design leaders to be thought partners

WHAT I DID

• Drive shift to 1) Business thinking, 2) Experimental design, 3) Thought leadership.
• Run workshops for design leaders on OKRs, business metrics & experimental design
• Negotiate & enable Design Team to present at exec level Quarterly Business Review (QBRs)

Example QBR report snippet below. In addition, I worked with Design Ops and the product design group (PDG) leads to send out regular updates about design experiments, early prototypes and test results to give the broader organization a view into work-in-progress versus just post launch data.

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IMPACT: Design Systems > Motion Design Team 
​
Objective: Increase experience of quality and delight across the app through motion design
Key Result: Reach 35 motion design tickets at the rate of 5 tickets per month.
Results: Delivered 47 motion design tickets to multiple product teams in H1.

Impact

• 75% increase in tipping amounts: ​​Tipping widget motion design (Transport)
• 20% drops in booking cancellation from finding driver screen (Transport)
• More than 1 million subscribed Goclub users (CP)
• Users find the whole experience delightful and enjoyable, based on user surveys (CP)
• 1.15% more driver profile details visits on Driver profile image animation (Transport)

OKR Score: 134%

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IMPACT: UX Writing Team
​ 
Objective: Become Scientists: Elevate the UX writing design practice & culture to embrace a growth mindset (experiments, learning outcomes, impact)
Key Result: Run 6 copy experiments to drive business impact at low eng cost
Results: 16 copy experiments completed. 
Impact

• Reduced the number of GoCar & GoRide cancellations by 1%: recovered 100,000 bookings per month & saved USD 120,000 per month
• 9% higher conversion and 8% higher tipping amount (compared to Control for Treatment groups on GoCar and GoRide tipping widget results in) 
• A series of GoPay’s biometric experiments resulted in a ~4.5% increase in biometric adoption
• Contextual message on a new entry point on Gojek homescreen resulted in ~85% cumulative uplift to both GoCar & GoRide PAS

OKR Score: 267%
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The design team at Gojek had the highest retention rate of any team in the entire organization.
The design leaders said that the QBR presentations were the hardest, most painful and most rewarding experience they had had as designers.