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.
- Background of the Working Group and CDC (Central Design Committee)
- The Working Group’s Principle
- Thoughts and process behind the final decision
- Our stance on BU, Platform and Special Bets (Eats, Plutus and Globalization)
- The Design structure
- Next in the pipeline
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:
- Discussion with design leads and stakeholders. In this stage, we talked to each design lead regarding the company’s structure that was informed by Chin Loong (CorpStrat), communicate timeline, ask them to have a re-allocation proposal. At the same time, we also collected information from Head of Business Units or representatives from the BU or department (this could be, among several, the design lead) regarding: collaboration preferences, concerns, vision and roadmap to be taken into consideration.
- Working group finalized the changes. Here we decided on the re-allocation and finalized together with design leads, double checked with other team’s representatives as well as Head of Business Units.
- Communicate the changes. Here we started to communicate to affected Designers, and affected stakeholders. “Affected designers” means those designers who are being re-allocated, whose assignments are being handed over to other designers, and who are experiencing transition of leads. “Affected stakeholders” means other parts in BU who are directly affected by this re-allocation.
- Optimize based on the individuals’ strength and contextual knowledge. We consider each individual's strength, knowledge, and meaningful experience. This is to optimize the team structure so that we can achieve Traveloka’s goal as Discovery platform while also catering to each individual’s aspiration in making a bigger impact.
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
- @Reza Arkan Partadiredja moves to CDC Branch 3 as the Designer Empowerment and will be assigned to Transport.
- @Dian Soraya Rachmawati (Aya) will be assigned to Transport as Designer Empowerment until June 2019. Previously, she spent 6 months in Accommodation.
- @Ananda Annisa Prasetyanto (Interaction Designer) and @Dira Anndhini (User Interface Designer) will join the Ground Transport team, handling the Car Rental product.
Experience
- @Dhea Sekararum will stay in Experience until March 2019 and move to CDC Branch 3.
- @Bakti Aditya Putra (User Interface Developer) will spend a portion of his time in Experience and CDC.
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.
- Eats Discovery
- Tya moves to CDC Branch 4 as a permanent member to work on Eats Discovery.
- @Sifra Pua Anggreyani (Interaction Designer) and @Vina Sectiana (User Interface Designer) are assigned to CDC Branch 4, they will work on Eats Discovery while their home base is still in Experience.
- @M Hilmy Fawwazy (User Interface Designer) and @Adinda Cita Wardhani (Product Copywriter) are assigned to CDC Branch 4, they will work on Eats Discovery while their home base is still in Transport.
- @Sonia Joshani Rahardja will be the Product Copy Editor for Eats on top of her role in Experience as she’s the one who has the most context of Eats and ability to transfer it to other copywriter assigned to Eats.
- Eats Activation
- Edmund will help the team find and validate business model as a Design Strategist.
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
- We are planning to revisit the overall design team structure that includes Story Lab team, rethinking its integration with the current structure and how to better synergize with other parties in the company.
- Next is to revisit the structure of the international design team.
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