To join Agoda Design - Relocation, Growth, and match

In this episode we interviewed Deven and Brie from design leadership to share their experience about relocation, design team culture and the growth opportunities in Agoda. We dived into what it’s like to work in Agoda as people manager and how they help shape the culture of the design team over the years. Last but not least, Deven and Brie shared the qualities we are looking for in a candidate during interviews.

Transcript

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Yuki Nishida  0:00  
Hello and welcome to another episode of Design Explores at Agoda Design. I'm your host, Yuki Nishida. And today we have not one, but two guests from design leadership team, Devon and Brie. Welcome to the show.

Deven Grover  0:14  
Thanks. So my name is Deven and head of design here at Agoda. And I've been with Agoda for about five and a half years in total. I'm actually a boomerang. I've worked here as a visual designer when I started, went into UX and then grew into management, and now managing the broader design team and sort of my second stint.

Briana Elam  0:36  
Thanks, Yuki. Yeah, my name is Brie. I've been with Agoda for six and a half years, I have a very similar pathway as Devon except for I'm not a boomerang. So I stayed here the whole time. But my experience, I was hired on as an IC, and we were growing so fast at the time. We were hiring a lot of people. I think we hired 22 people in the first year. So we grew this six to 22 in the first year, and it was a lot of growth and meant a lot of growth for us as well.

Yuki Nishida  1:04  
One of the things that really fascinated me and is different from my background is that both of you are foreigners. What was your experience like first coming to Thailand and having to relocate here?

Briana Elam  1:16  
Yeah, I mean, I had no idea what to expect when I was coming to Thailand. I have a very different background. And Devin, I didn't live all over. I've only lived in Seattle, Washington my whole entire life before this. So my experience is very limited when it came to, you know, exposure to other kind of cultures and in, you know, work environments, that sort of thing. So when I first came here to Thailand, I didn't know what to expect. But I felt like if I - even when I came here to interview, you experience all these new things, but you can't really picture yourself living here because you - it's so different of an experience from Seattle, like, you know, it's, you know, like, it's Seattle, you know it like the back of your hand. And then you come here, and it's just a whole new world. But what I knew is that if I didn't, if I didn't take the opportunity to experience it, I know I would have regretted it. And I would always be back in my mind thinking, what if I would have taken that job in Thailand? What would have been like, what kind of experience could have had? And I'm so glad I did. Because my first experience coming here, it was like, sensory overload. I've never been to Southeast Asia before. You'd walk down the street and you're like, "Oh, that smells so good. I have to have it. I don't know what it is, I have to have it." Two seconds later, you're like, "Oh, my God, that smells so bad. I'm gonna throw up." It's just the city of contrast. And I think that was really, I really loved it. I thought that it was just a great first experience. And moving here, you see so many new things. It was just awesome.

Deven Grover  2:47  
Yeah, I'd say when I left the States, I was living in Texas, so and living in Austin, and lived in the suburbs. And my son was just born and you know, settled into my home and bought the car and did the whole family thing. So for me, moving to Thailand was a huge question mark, you know? I wasn't sure if it was gonna be the right fit for my family, if it was gonna be the right fit for my son growing up there and getting a good education, and sort of moving from the suburbs and having a home and coming into a very busy metropolitan city was a huge risk and huge opportunity to at the same time. But when I flew out here for the interview process, you know, I interviewed for a couple days, and then I had five days to really explore the city. And I was really impressed with you know, seeing how great the infrastructure was, great schooling was, you know how great housing was here. And really, it was, you know, an environment where you can get all the first world services for an amazing price, but also a great experience and in great diversity as well.

Yuki Nishida  3:48  
Hey, Yuki from post production here, we've glossed over a few points that would want to clarify about relocation. So after the recording, Devin actually shared further comments that I thought might be helpful to share with your listeners as well, which is about the uncertainty of relocating to Bangkok. I didn't know about this prior to the recording, but Agoda employs over 2,000 expats across 60 to 70 nationalities. And what this means is that our recruiting staff are very well equipped in making sure the relocation is right for all our candidates and their families. At the same time, we do want to make sure candidates that consider moving here is comfortable, since that directly impacts productivity and morale. And so in many ways, it's an all party's interest to make sure that all candidates are confident with the idea of moving to Bangkok. So if you're ever interested or wondering about what it's like to move to Thailand, please do inquire with your recruiter and interviewers, or anyone from the design team for that matter, and we would be more than happy to help answer any questions that you might have. With that, let's continue with the podcast about growth and career progression. 

So one of the things that I have actually learned while talking to interviewers and recruiters is that a lot of the candidates look for growth and whether they can have that at Agoda. What are some ways that Agoda ensures that other candidates and people that enter the team have the right career progression? 

Briana Elam  5:22  
As far as career development within Agoda, we do have leveling documentation that we refer back to. And we offer growth with six different roles on the IC pathway, or the individual contributor pathway, and four on the management pathway at this time. So we allow for a lot of a lot of opportunity, if you want to go back into, you know, the management path, or if you want to go to like the IC pathway, we have that already documented and clear ways to move from one level to another. A lot of it, though, really is about the individual driving their own career. So it's not like, oh, we have this checklist and that means that you get to the next step. It's really about what is your checklist that you've defined as an individual that you want to grow in? Because we're all unique individuals, we all have things that we suck at, we all have things that we're really excelling at. And so what does that checklist look like for us individually to get into that next level? And then how can we be set up for success working with our managers to then give us the right challenges to prove that we can get into that role.

Yuki Nishida  6:30  
So one of the things when Deven was still my manager, and we're going through, like what I can do to improve myself, I was actually told that I don't have to excel at every single point, right? That people have different things and different strengths and weaknesses that they can always be working on. It's not like a checklist that we all have to tick. There are some things that you can always work on, even if you do get promoted. Just because I have just one thing that I'm really bad at doesn't mean it's going to prevent me from moving on to the next level.

Briana Elam  7:02  
Also, it's okay to fail. I fail all the time. I think failure is a great learning experience, we all do it, we're all gonna make mistakes in our role and it's okay. We can fail fast, pick ourselves up, learn from the experience, try not to do it again, try to help others not fail in the same way that we just did. But it's common. This is how a lot of us are learning, we, a lot of the stuff we've not done before. Like moving into management, that's a challenging thing to do. And we learn from a lot of our mistakes. So it's okay to fail. And it's not expected that we're perfect in our roles either.

Deven Grover  7:38  
One of the good things I found working at Agoda is because you're coming in as a product designer, and you're working with stakeholders across of you know, the product with it with research, with business analytics, the data team with legal team. You get a lot of exposure to different teams and sort of their background. And you get to sort of get, a lot of great learnings to really grow your career, become a much stronger designer, and understanding the entire business product cycle versus just coming in and focusing on like outputting good visual design. So I think when you come into go to the good part is you get a lot of exposure to learn these things. And I think it drives a lot of value in your career growth as well.

Yuki Nishida  8:18  
One of the things that I think you guys are the best to answer this question. How do we structure the team? We currently have five teams?

Deven Grover  8:29  
Oh, yeah. So the team at a high level is sort of split between like two big parts of our, our scope. So there's sort of our consumer side of our product. And then the second part is sort of our supply side of the product. And within both of these spaces, the teams are sort of broken down into two smaller squads that have multiple designers, multiple PMs, engineers, researchers, and also sort of different supporting functions from like, whether it's legal or business analytic partners, depending on sort of, you know, the scope of that specific product.

Briana Elam  9:05  
Yeah. And then just to expand on that, each team offers really interesting challenges, too, which I think is really cool. So as a designer, maybe you want to come in and you're hired in one particular team. And that's great, you learn and you become a subject matter expert in that area. But you also have the opportunity to learn very different ways of designing and learning how to design for the product. So for example, design systems is my team. It's very technical. We're in this crazy phase where we're now have like a centralized design system, and we're, we're learning tons. Then we think about the like new funnels team, which is really interesting, because we don't have a lot of data on that stuff before. So we're doing a lot of research. We're trying to do a lot of benchmarking. It's a lot on the designer to drive the best user experience and leverage the best practices. The core team which is hotel is really interesting because it has all the data. It's really optimized on, you know, tons and tons of experiments there. And so we have really interesting opportunities to dive deep into the data and inform your designs using that data. On the enterprise side, it's broken up into two teams. We have the supply side, which is really interesting, because this is the way that our hotels upload their properties. And so that means that they're our customer. It's really challenging to because there's a lot of opportunities for improvement. And on the, on the consumer excellence group, or CEG, which is much easier, there's a lot of really interesting challenging spaces for building better tools and products for our agents who are, you know, assisting customers who are calling in and wanting to amend their bookings, and things like that. So a lot of different areas of learning and really challenging spaces, and all of them that offer unique abilities to grow your career. And...

Deven Grover  10:50  
And, yeah, I would say one of the great things across these, these different teams is designers have a wide variety of different working models. There's designers that are working to sort of optimize the existing product. There's designers that are sort of building out a vision for long term. There's designers that are working on like milestone projects. So I think there's a wide range of sort of projects they get to work on it sort of drive their careers forward.

Yuki Nishida  11:14  
As we mentioned earlier, an interview is a two-way street, right? We are interviewing them and candidates are also interviewing, whether there's a match. And so what are some of the things that we look for in a candidate?

Deven Grover  11:29  
Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things we look for when we interview a candidate is sharing your narrative and sharing your story, are really looking to understand not just your experience and skills, but really sort of, you know, your process and how you came to those decisions when you delivered your designs. Really want to understand, you know, not just the craft, but how you came to that informative decision on how that craft was delivered, you know. What was that process of working with different people across the team, rather, as product managers, engineers, research. We want to learn that process of getting from the initiation stage to the final stage.

Briana Elam  12:03  
And I think it's also important to craft the narrative to the audience as well. So if you were to take, you know, your website and show us your website, you know, it might tell a case study. But if you were able to craft that narrative specifically for the role that you're looking for here, and tell us a more engaging story about those things that Devin, Devin was just addressing, it's really engaging. And I think it also goes to show that you've put a lot of effort into this interview process, and you're dedicated to representing your skill sets to us.

Deven Grover  12:35  
Yeah, and the other part we want to learn is, you know, because Agoda is a an environment where you're going to be collaborating with designers, with product managers, and with engineers, specifically around like how you drove collaboration, and you communicated with your stakeholders across the team. Often when you're working on a product, you know, there's a lot of trade offs that you have to make. And there's a lot of difficult decisions you make when you're outputting product. And I think it's important that you share that story, because it helps us understand that if you were to come to Agoda to how would you manage those difficult conversations and sort of those relationships you have.

Briana Elam  13:08  
Another really interesting thing that I like to hear from candidates is how they might have done something differently going through a process. We all make mistakes and hindsight is 20/20. So if you go through a project, and you represent your, you know, your wins and your successes, that's awesome. It's also nice to say, "Okay, if I would have had more time, or if I would have actually invested more in this area, I could have, I could have had a better product". Or "we'd like to go back and look at this more". So I think that's also really interesting. It shows that you know, we're all human, that's okay. How do we improve and iterate on the product?

Yuki Nishida  13:41  
Brie, you mentioned a little bit earlier about growth mindset, right? And why it's really important in our team, in our previous conversation, went to great distances and actually claim that growth mindset is more important at times than craft. Right? Why do you think this is the case?

Briana Elam  14:00  
I think there's, when we hire people like associate designers, they may not have any real world experience yet. They may not have worked in an environment that is like ours, and working with product managers, managing relationships, working with developers handing off our products and that way and, and their craft, yes, they have that foundation, but they haven't necessarily put it to practice yet. So they don't have anything to show in their portfolio. But if they have a very strong growth mindset, they can learn this stuff. While we, while on the job. We have designed systems to really help our designers design better, and be able to think about the more challenging things like what does the user want? What's the rationale behind the designs versus having to have perfect craft all the time? And, and that's, that should be, I think that growth mindset is something that we need to carry through not even just an associate, but throughout our whole entire career to drive us forward. Craft is, a lot of the way we work at Agoda has to be learned no matter if you're the best designer in the entire world and you have all of the experience you still need. You need to know how to work with us, you need to know how to work with our process with our PMs with our developers, how to build relationships internally as well. Like, it's all, all of that is a lot easier if you're self-driven, and you're motivated to learn and grow yourself. And it becomes a lot easier to produce a great product, if you have that as your as your primary kind of skill sets and craft is one of those things you're going to have to learn.

Deven Grover  15:27  
Yeah, I would say, you know, craft is one of those things that is sort of a necessity for good designers. I think you need to have that foundational element of designing good designs. But I think when you, when you're thinking of a product organization, the why is very important. Why are you, why are you specifically designing that output? How does that design actually impact both the user as well as the business. And I think being able to articulate that, in your conversations with your stakeholders is a critical part of being successful in the row, the role in growing continuously at Agoda. So I think, you know, when you are showcasing your case study, doing interviews, you know, really sort of focusing on the why, and sort of what impact you drove with your users as well as the business is important to share in that process, as well.

Briana Elam  16:14  
And we also have examples of team members who have come from other cross functional teams that are not design, that were so driven in their career, they knew they wanted to become UX designers. They took a lot of courses offline, they're self-driven, self-taught. And then they came in with the growth mindset and sold themselves, "Well, I can learn this stuff". And now they're very successful designers within the team. So I don't think that, yes, craft is super important. It is that foundation that we always have to have. And we need to continue to learn in one way or the other, whether we're doing it self driven, or whether we're doing it prior to getting a job at a go to wherever job design we get. But that growth mindset is what really pushes our career forward.

Yuki Nishida  16:56  
One of the strong qualities that I do see in our design team is the diversity, as we mentioned earlier. Was this something that was intentionally kind of curated for or because of where we are? It's just how the team came about?

Briana Elam  17:11  
It's a melting pot.

Deven Grover  17:13  
Yeah, I wouldn't say it wasn't like intentional, like, it wasn't like we had a KPI from like, the people team that we needed to go hire X amount of nationalities. But I think, you know, being in Southeast Asia, and just, you know, having the opportunities to really hire a global workforce was sort of in our favor. And I think, you know, building out a product that is from multiple different countries, works in our favor, because we have people with that experience in that background, from different regions.

Briana Elam  17:41  
Also, our team is really diverse, we have 24-25 different nationalities in the design organization. We have very, even my team, my team has 10 different nationalities on my team right now. It's just my team. We have, I think it's something that is one of our biggest selling points. It also means that you have to craft, you have to invest in the way that you communicate as well. It's not just the way that you communicate with the people that you're used to communicating with. I think one of the biggest learnings for me coming over to work at Agoda is I'd never been exposed to so much diversity and culture. So the way I communicated previously, in my, in my old work was, it's very Western, it's very straightforward. It's very, you know, you just get into this way of communicating with the people that you're working with. And when I came to Thailand working for Agoda, we have such a diverse team, and so many different backgrounds, so many different cultures, different perspectives, different ways of going to school, and learning. And all of these things really impact the way that you communicate with each other. And you have to go out of your way to make sure that you address, address people in a way that makes them feel heard, that makes them feel supported. Like I remember when I first started coming over here, very open, very communicative, and it would just be crickets on the team, like nobody would respond. So had to figure out how to engage everyone on the team. When everyone feels comfortable speaking in front of teams, in front of large groups. Not everyone has the same kind of communication style. In fact, it's rude at times if you speak out of turn in some cultures. So you want to, you need to make sure that you're adopting your communication style to support everybody on the team.

Deven Grover  19:25  
You know, having diversity in a team is one of the strongest person we have. But it definitely came with a lot of challenges initially. You know, I think when you sort of think of Western markets and sort of Eastern markets, one of the biggest sort of differences was we found that, generally in Southeast Asia, we found people that had experience working with companies that were very hierarchy based, so often when they would join a go to, they would sort of just wait for their manager to tell them what to do, where our culture was more about, you sort of own a specific product and you sort of drive that with your product manager. So it was a big investment in our part to really make them feel like they're safe in this space and they had a voice and they were able to drive that product with their managers. So I think now that we're four or five years into this team, and we built that strong culture, we really see a lot of young designers that are coming in, even though culturally outside of the office, they may have a very hierarchy-based environment, they do feel safe in this environment to sort of, you know, carry their voice forward.

Yuki Nishida  20:22  
As part of the design leadership team, we have had to go through the pandemic in terms of working from home and now we're coming back to the hybrid model where we work two days a week at the office. What was it like for you to kind of see the changes of people coming back to the office as well as having people work remotely?

Deven Grover  20:44  
Yeah, I think it's been great being back in the office two days a week. You know, when I walk past meeting rooms or just walk past, you know, designers working in the hallways and whiteboarding, you know, different sort of solutions and things like that, I think the energy that you get face-to-face is probably not matchable, being working remotely 100%. I think it really helps us be more efficient, and build sort of a culture of inclusivity, and also driving more of a social engagement within the members on the team.

Briana Elam  21:16  
Yeah, for me, I think that it was really hard to manage COVID. And being in a pandemic, working from home, everybody had to manage a lot of change, everybody was worried about getting sick, you're not leaving your apartment, feel like when it comes to the change, work from home, people lost touch of the culture, a culture that we really tried hard to build, it was really hard for people to onboard remotely, where they didn't get access to the culture, they weren't able to see the cross-functional teams, they weren't able to build those relationships as easily. And it was challenging for a lot of those people onboarding, you know, remotely, just don't get the same kind of contact that and like, you know, you don't, you don't have exposure to the same kind of culture that we're trying to build. So now that we're back in the office two times a week, which I think is a great model, because we're still able to do a lot of the operational stuff we need to do at home. But now we have the ability to have elevator conversations, and we get to have lunches together. And it's a lot more social, we have coffee conversations, and, you know, a casual beer after work here and there. It's a lot more fun. And I feel like there's a lot more engagement. And there's been a lot of positive feedback from the team around how they, they weren't sure. They weren't sure about being back in the office, if they would like it or not, for those who had never been in the office. Now they find that it's a lot more engaging, and they feel a lot more connected to their team members, and a lot more productive actually.

Deven Grover  22:49  
I think I agree with Brie, I think it's not necessarily something that's necessary for your day to day job. But I think, you know, one of the goddess founding principles is, is moving fast. And we you know, when you're moving fast, often, you know, things get lost in, in sort of the, the shadows at times. So I think by having designers work more closely in the office and sort of collaborate with cross-functional teams, sometimes it gives us opportunities to identify areas where potentially we could work together and make our product better, and get product managers to potentially get together and sort of collaborate as well.

Briana Elam  23:25  
And it doesn't happen. It just happens organically. It's not like you have to "Oh, I'm going to set a meeting to know exactly what every team is going to be doing". What you're doing is engaging with people on the elevator and talking about what they're doing on their day-to-day basis, or, you know, what kind of challenges they're facing or having lunch and saying "Hey" to teammates, and, and then it just happens organically. And that's been really helpful. And I've missed that a lot because I've lost complete context of what other cross functional teams are doing and what the cool stuff they're contributing to. And yeah, so it's been kind of in the dark for the last two years.

Deven Grover  24:01  
Yeah, I think these conversations are important as well, you know, when we're collaborating with different teams across the board, because sometimes, you know, product is working on individual products. And they have very different KPIs where designers are thinking of the user and the whole user experience, and they sort of bring it all together to sort of create that vision for, for long term as well.

Yuki Nishida  24:22  
All right, I think that wraps up the episode for today. Thank you, Deven and Brie for joining the show. 

Deven Grover  24:27  
Yea, thank you so much, Yuki, for facilitating this. If you want to learn more about Agoda Design team, you can visit agoda.design. And if you want to learn more about open roles, you can visit careers@agoda.com

Briana Elam  24:40  
Thanks so much for facilitating this. This is really fun.

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