Design Team Structure

Hi all,

As promised, we from the CDC (Central Design Committee) working group is announcing several things regarding the new design team structure that covers Product Design. As for Story Lab, there will be a separate announcement.

Outline of this post is as follows. We recommend you to read the whole content through to get an optimal context and understanding.

1. Background of the Working Group and CDC (Central Design Committee)

This Working Group consists of the CDC PICs, whose focus covers:
Branch 1 - Values & Principles of the Design Team (PIC: @Yunita Pasari)
Branch 2 - Design Operations (Process, Tools, Workflows) (PIC: @Arie Aulia Nugraha)
Branch 3 - Designer Empowerment (PIC: @Arganka Yahya)
Branch 4 - Design Advocacy, Consultancy, Advisory (PIC: @Torbjørn Aksdal)
More about CDC

CDC has formed a working group that mainly focuses on the restructuring of the design team and ensuring a smooth reallocation/transition of designers, as an effort to support the overall company restructuring happening in Q4 2018 - Q1 2019.

2. The Working Group’s Principle

We believe that a smooth change management is crucial in this restructuring, because change is a sensitive issue for humans, and that needs proper handling by a dedicated working group. Clarity is needed for the designers to ensure better understanding of work scope and space for each individuals to be on their best performance, aside from better collaboration. However, we realize that this cannot serve all needs at the same time, yet it’s optimized to achieve Traveloka’s goal rather than just particular teams.

3. Thoughts and process behind the final decision

Prior to this official announcement, we have gone through these steps:

4. Our stance on BU, Platform and Special Bets (Eats, Plutus and Globalization)

We see Eats as the company sees it. It's not a BU, but treated as special bet/special project. Consequently, Eats does not have the same design structure as is found in BU. Unlike a BU which is treated as a designer’s homebase, all designers being placed in Eats have their own homebase, either in their previous BU (those coming from “L&D”) or as a part of CDC Branch 4. We believe this would provide more clarity to the designers in terms of reporting line and organizational identity.

This is also one of the reasons why we might appear to be reaching out to certain BUs first. Not because we prioritize one over the others, but because the change of structure and allocation is more immediate.

5. The design structure

This is the final structure of the design team. This can be accessed without having to sign in.
https://realtimeboard.com/app/board/o9J_ky-7vnU=/?moveToWidget=3074457346368366810

In words:
Transport

Experience

Accommodation

Platform

Special Bets
We believe Eats should have one vision, thus we don’t separate the design strategy for Eats Discovery and Activation although we agree both Discovery and Activation are solving different problems and have different metrics. We’ll have @Adwitya Nugrahawati (Tya) to work on Eats Discovery design strategy and @Edmund Goh to work on Eats Activation design strategy. The two will help craft the whole vision and design strategy for Eats.

We acknowledge that this arrangement is far from perfect, and we can’t accommodate all needs (designer’s growth, design team and stakeholder collaboration, business needs, capabilities, and individual’s interests) at the same time. Although there might still be some missing pieces, we are doing the best we can to fill them in.

6. Next in the pipeline

Last but not the least, please reach out to the working group for any concerns related to this. Albert might have some context but he would eventually transfer the message to us, so it would be much more efficient and effective if you reach out to us directly, especially if there are needs that require immediate actions.

Best regards,
Central Design Committee