Travel Platform team - Introducing Agoda Design teams #1

Hello and welcome to Design Explorers. I am your host, Ho Reh. And I'm Yu-Kin Ishida. Design Explorers is a podcast by the Agoda Design Team. Agoda is a global digital travel platform where you can book hotels, vacation homes, flights and more. In this podcast, we will be sharing the awesome work from our talented designers and trends in relation in the two of our favorite things. Travel and Design. In the next five episodes, we will be exploring the functions of each team of Agoda Design. Travel platforms, core, enterprise design systems and customer experience group. Today we talk to the designers in travel platform team and it's very special because you're in it. Yeah, I don't get a lot of chances to be on the other side of the table and I guess share some of my own stories. And so I really get to kind of listen to how my team that I work with daily feel about the position and how they perceive based on their previous experiences. So it's just great to listen to what they have to say. Yeah, exactly. So without further ado, let's go on with the episodes. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to design explorers. Today we have three guests on our show all from travel platforms team. We have Hansi, Pang and Darren. Welcome to the show. Hi, I'm Hansi. I'm a product design manager at Agoda and I manage the travel platform team. I started out in the enterprise team. So I was working on the hotel facing product and I actually appeared in one podcast some months ago about that. Yeah, and then after that I moved to the trips team. Now I transitioned into design manager and manage the travel platforms. Hi, my name is Pang. I'm a Thai designer here in Agoda and I joined Agoda for eight years now. Yes, it is. Yeah, and I'm just joined Agoda flight for almost ten months and I think flight is like a new company for me and there's many decided challenge that we want to strive to be a good product. So we'll talk about that for later. Hello, I'm Darren and I'm a firm designer. I've been in Agoda for one year now. I'm part of the trips team and previously I was with decar accommodations. I only joined the trips team for about two months now. Thank you guys for coming. We never have so many so much guests in our episodes. Without further ado, let's jump into our topics today. Great. So we would want to kind of go into description and detail about what you guys work on within travel platforms and kind of unwrap your day today. And the first question is, could you summarize in a few sentences what you work on? Perhaps Hansi as a manager of travel platforms. Do you want to kind of take it over? Yeah, sure. So the travel platform team is basically on the newer products that Agoda is working on. So if you might know Agoda's call product is our accommodations booking funnel and that has been there for about ten years or so. But in the last two years we are working on a lot of newer products and these includes like flights, activities, booking funnels and in the last month or so we also launched a shopping cart. So what all these products are is that they would help Agoda become a one stop travel platform where anyone who is looking to travel can just come on Agoda and book everything related to your trip. So all these products that are really new, there's so many things that we can work on for these products. So many things that we can do to influence the roadmap. These are the new products that our company is investing heavily in so that Agoda can one day become you know a one stop travel platform where anyone can browse for anything. So I think that's the best way to do it. So what are the best ways to do it? What is the most fun or challenging about working within your own team? So I've just joined the team two months ago. And one I noticed is that everyone is really excited and passionate about, you know, shaping the future of Agoda because everything in the travel platforms team is relatively new. So there's a lot of exciting things to be working on is very fresh and there's innovation as well. So I like how the designers have the capacity to shape the product from map and counterfeit years that are receptive, that our product managers are receptive and open to. So I find that there's a lot of impact in what we were going and I'm really excited to be part of this journey. Yeah, and I think you mentioned that everything is new and fresh, right? I think it's a consequence of that it makes things a bit ambiguous at times because we are solving big questions, very big questions to answer. Like for example, what is the vision of flights that's going to be in the next one or two years, right? Yeah, and then, yeah, so there's all these big questions, all these ambiguity, there's a lot of things that we need to uncover in order to figure out what are we going to build in the next few years. But I think that's also where it's fun, right? Since we have to convince our stakeholders that whatever we plan to do has value. Yeah, and not just business value and of course as designers, we always want to strive for what's the best user experience for our users. And I think that shows in whatever we do, right? Like we always try to balance our user experience, what helps our users as well as bring business value for the company. Exactly. Since we ourselves are travelers as well, we want to imagine a future where a quota is able to meet these needs. And there's a lot that we can think about in terms of shipping a travel platform. So I think it's really an interesting space to be in this time. As a traveler, I definitely agree that what you mentioned, like, yeah, I can't, I wanted to imagine like one day I go to, I could be the one hub where I can use on everything for my travel needs. That's such a big, such a big, yeah, big green. Yeah, currently I feel like the experience is also a bit, so I'm like segmented because we use so many different tools and products outside. And it's really hard for the user to organize all their bookings and you know, it takes a lot of time to also do your research. We want to ease that pain, that user pain so that they can just focus on the travel itself. Yeah, and that's where the trip steam comes in, right? Like how we want to bring convenience to our users as they go along that trip. Exactly. So once you're out of challenge that life is in a quota or like specifically the trip steam is that we have like more stakeholders to align with. Because a go that's a big company and we're touching at like pages across the entire funnel or across different panels. In fact, we need to sync up with the designers, the PMs and that takes a lot of time and also a lot of collaboration. So we need to plan ahead and also share as early as possible so that everyone is aware of knows what we're doing. And yeah, I think that planning and all that syncing across is crucial. if we want to be able to move fast and get our product out there faster. Do you feel like having a lot of these meetings and syncopes is actually eating your time of actually designing? It does actually. I know it's important. Like all these meetings and syncs are like important for us to get alignment. So we have to be very techful about it. Are these meetings actually necessary? Could they be in the form of an email or a select message? Or we can even make these meetings even more efficient by sending the documents ahead of time or even as simple as putting out an agenda. So these are some of the ways that I would navigate around trying to block time for myself to do actual work. The other challenge that I personally find it kind of hard to adapt to is that I have to throw away a lot of good ideas. I think because it's so new and what we have to focus on are the depth efforts that we have is limited. Of course resources is every limited with every project but I think this takes that to another level and kind of really having to identify where is the business opportunities and any ideas that sometimes might be delighting users but it doesn't directly contribute towards the business KPI or at least the goals that we want to achieve. The product objectives that we want to achieve and if it doesn't align to that sometimes we have to park it and say okay where it will this actually fitting and I think I've slowly begun to get accustomed to that fact where every little idea that possibly you get inspiration from randomly you'd write it down and really quickly notice that you know this is something that we can't actually work on in the next year because we have all these things laid out for these roadmap and it doesn't seem like it's more important than the things that we have worked on before. So you mentally go through these iterative conversion diversion loop very quickly which allows you to kind of hone your own product thinking skills alongside of of course your graph your alongside of your craft as well. So yeah I think I'm hearing all the fun and challenging what about some of the highlights in the team since you guys work in it. I think like previously we have a shopping cart like visioning and brainstorming right and I think like there's a lot of fun in the team kind of like gather all the designer or you can like have some research team PMs and everyone to to brainstorm what product we will look like for our customer yeah you have anything here. Yes so like like you mentioned cut just launch to our users out there and we believe that it will be a good liver and help you know our users consolidate and come like use it as a tool to decide on their combinations and we are still planning on you know how the future of a goda as a platform would be like so there's lots of visioning work that we're doing and we've come a long way and seeing how we're given that space to go and explore and imagine the future of a goda five to ten years from now right it's quite a scary thought but also exciting at the same time. I'm going to abuse my my card as a person that works on travel platforms as well and typically the host that mainly listens but today I can be on the other side and share some of my opinions and experiences as well. I think I definitely agree with that they're in in that you know where it's kind of sometimes daunting to you know claim that you know what the state of the industry should be like in the next five years but at the same time we work with a lot of smart people to make sure that what we're crafting as our vision is backed up by evidence and we have a lot of confidence kind of moving forward in terms of that I think we work very closely with our product to kind of create that product roadmap in order to break down this this ginormous task and try to address it day by day and so I really enjoy that aspect of you know being in this team and trying to craft that roadmap alongside of other smart people. Oh and on top of that I think that links to how we back up our ideas with insights right whether it's qualitative or quantitative insights we don't just like come up with ideas and and we don't just think that as a product designer or you know we think that our users would like it it's not that way but it's we look at the data that we have collected from millions of users that use a goda and of course the qualitative insights that we get from interviews with users and then use these to back up our ideas so that we will be more confident in our ideas that this should be you know ideas that this is the direction that the company should hate in the next few years and yeah like I think what is so splendid about you know I'm working on this as well is that as what you can mention we get to work with lots of people right especially our team of like 50-plus designers we interact with the core combination planter also design systems team everyone is willing to give feedback and good actionable feedback at that so at times we do collaborative white boarding sessions but everyone is just paying down ideas and we don't limit our every every once opinion matters so that's why such white boarding sessions are important because we want to get everyone's perspective so it doesn't matter if you're junior or league because we take everything to consideration and also a big team so no team is working in silo we have to share go of making a goda like you know the best travel platform we can ever be that's really the best feeling in my opinion like working with other excellent designers for all these hard work you guys did what about a work life balances and oh basically like for flight team as as you know we we're working hard right and coffee and tea is become a part of our life so we can kind of like create like coffee or tea session in the afternoon or already in or in the evening so just for people to to share about the life and talk rather than like working all day yeah it's kind of like get to know people and anything that is a fun session as well and anything can see you join our flight bowling as well right yeah that was really crazy like we booked out a private bowling alley and then inside the bowling alley there was a karaoke system so wow we got to hear a lot of people sing across the flight team and that was really interesting but yeah I definitely agree I think even in typical you know how to be a good designer books and I guess tutorials and whatnot you would often see like have good relationship or have personal relationships with the people that work with you even from like the develop development team as well as a product team but I think at a go-to we kind of believe that from our hearts and we would just have random sessions where you know once work is done everyone has kind of a mutual understanding that you know you want to understand or learn more about the person beyond the work responsibilities so I really appreciate that being able to share some of my own personal goals and at the same time learn about others and how we could potentially you know meet and do more things beyond work yeah I definitely agree like I think it's important for us to you know not only learn about the people around us in the only team but also people from outside your team and there are so many opportunities for us to do that especially in like the aspects of after work hours we will hang out do activities like badminton, pottery, even way tight together so for the next question it's mostly for the listener who are interested in joining Agota we wanted to know that what type of person would enjoy tackling problems on your team I think first and foremost definitely someone who embraces and enjoys solving ambiguous problems faces I know this is a theme that we've talked about a lot of times but really because these are so okay because all these products are very young there is so much we can do to improve them we really need someone who can take a step back look at the product as a whole and look at the whole user journey as a whole even and see what's wrong and come up with a north star that we can all work towards yet break down into phases to implement yeah and slowly evolve these designs over time on top of that like this people have to also be very open about changing ever changing requirements because it's just part of the job we will iterate along the way as what UK has mentioned before and they have to not be so attached to the ideas they have to learn how to go ahead with one solution if even if not everyone agrees with it you try because that's how agota is we will re-experiment everything and we look at the data after what to see if that solution is valid or not and we make improvements from then forward. Yeah I think one thing for me that I learned in Dakota so far and I think like working in Dakota and especially with the new product is like make us humble. I think that what we learned so far is like we can expect the product outcome but also like we can learn from the data we get we can learn from the real user feedback and stay fresh on the new product. So I think like in the long term like you will grow as a designer so far. I think you need to be love working on from zero to one right as you guys are working on such a new innovative product in the business in this big organization. Okay so last but not least I think you really would need to love working on zero to one project because this is the team where new product finals will be introduced right so we might be building a new product in like a few years or a few months who knows and if you want to build up products from scratch then this is definitely the team for you. So we're also looking for people who enjoy collaborating with people. I think like design itself no one can solve problems on their own you definitely need to involve others with you so that this prevents bias in your work and also they would be able to pinpoint like flaws or even edge cases in some of your works. And okay that's our time today. Thank you all for joining us and thanks for you key for being part of the interview as well. I always love you to be here and thank you Hansi, Pang and Darren. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast please leave us a review on Apple podcasts Spotify or anywhere you are listening and share it with your friends and colleagues. Don't forget to subscribe to our show to get notified when we're releasing a new episode. And if you want to learn more about the work of the design team at Agota visit agota.design. Thanks again for listening and hope to see you in our next episode.