Travel Platform team - Introducing Agoda Design teams #1

On this part 1 of our mini series, we deep dive into each team at Agoda Design. Today, we have Travel Platform team with us and share their day to days as well as highlight and challenges.

Transcript

Rachel Hou  00:01
Hello, and welcome to Design Explorers. I am your host, Hou Ruei. And I'm Yuki Nichido.

Yuki Nishida  00:08
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.

Rachel Hou  00:18
In this podcast, we will be sharing the awesome work from our talented designers and trends in relation and two of our favorite things -- travel and design.

Yuki Nishida  00:37
In the next five episodes, we'll be exploring the functions of each team of Agoda Design, travel platforms, core enterprise design systems and Customer Experience Group.

Rachel Hou  00:50
Today, we talk to the designers in Travel Platforms team. And it's very special because you're in it.

Yuki Nishida  00:57
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 would really get to kind of listen to how my team that I work with daily feels about the position and how they perceive based on their previous experiences. So it was just great to listen to what they have to say.

Rachel Hou  01:18
Yeah, exactly. So without further ado, let's go on with the episodes.

Yuki Nishida  01:24
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Design Explorers. Today we have three guests on our show, all from Travel Platforms team. We have Han Xi, Pang, and Darren. Welcome to the show.

Han Xi Lee  01:36
Hi, I'm Han Xi. I'm a product design manager at Agoda. And I manage the Travel Platforms 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 a design manager and manage the travel platforms.

(Pang) Chutimon Tangtanaporn  01:59
Hi, my name is Fang. I am a Thai designer here in Agoda. And I joined Agoda for eight years now. Yes. Yeah, and just joined Agoda Flight for almost 10 months. And I think Flight is like a new company for me. And there's many design challenges that that we want to strive to be a good product. So we'll talk about that for later.

Darren Yong Lee  02:24
Hello. I'm Darren and I'm a product designer. I've been in Agoda for one year now. I'm part of the Trips team. And previously I was with the car accommodations. I only joined the Trips team for about two months now.

Rachel Hou  02:41
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.

Yuki Nishida  02:51
Right, 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-to-day. And the first question is, could you summarize in a few sentences what you work on? Perhaps Han Xi, as a manager of Travel Platforms, do you want to kind of take it over?

Han Xi Lee  03:12
Yeah, sure. So the Travel Platforms team is basically on the newer products that Agoda is working on. So, as you might know Agoda is called a product with our accommodations booking funnel. And that has been there for about 10 years or so. But in the last few years, we are working on a lot of newer products. And this 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 will 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 they are ... being knew ... 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 for their trip and book it immediately.

Rachel Hou  04:10
Thanks. So, my understanding is that you're from Flight team. Can you give us a little bit introduction of what you do.

(Pang) Chutimon Tangtanaporn  04:18
Okay, for Flight in Agoda we have flight booking service for a couple years, and now, we are we are working hard to deliver the best experience of booking flights and also like working a lot on about giving customer the best value and inventory.

Rachel Hou  04:36
Ah! So with Flights there's also Activities teams. Han Xi would you chime in on what this team does? 

Han Xi Lee  04:44
Yeah, sure, since our Activities designer is not here with us today. So, I can give you a brief introduction. Our Activities funnel is our newest product funnel. We just launched it in 2021, I believe, and we are super excited about it. So we really want to build up the funnel experience to be the best product that you can use to book all sorts of activities, whether it's multi-day tours or just day tours to theme park tickets or even event tickets. So we also thought of activities that you might want to do on your trip.

Rachel Hou  05:14
Yeah, Agoda is doing a lot more than most people are thinking, just from learning from you guys. Darren, what about you? What does your team does?

Darren Yong Lee  05:24
So yeah, I'm from the Trips team, and Trips is essentially the glue that connects all the travel products on Agoda that we offer to our consumers so that Agoda can be that one-stop platform for all your travel needs, from flights to activities, even your hotel. And what we are trying to do in our team is to inspire travelers to book more because what they'll get is value and greater choice from booking with us. So we do that by giving them better discounts and value.

Yuki Nishida  05:56
And convenience. Don't for get convenience. Yeah.

Darren Yong Lee  05:59
Yeah, so that they can plan their trip Agoda as much as we can.

Yuki Nishida  06:03
Awesome. Thanks, everyone, for kind of summarizing that. For our next question, it's going to be the meat or the most fun thing that I'm really looking forward to hearing from you. What is the most fun or challenging about working within your own team.

Darren Yong Lee  06:19
So, I've just joined the team two months ago. And what I notice 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. It's very fresh. And there's innovation as well. So I like how the designers have the capacity to shape the product roadmap and come up with ideas 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 work on. And I'm really excited to be part of this journey.

Han Xi Lee  07:04
Yeah, and I think you mentioned that everything is new and fresh, right? And I think as a consequence of that, it makes things a bit ambiguous at times because we are solving like, big questions, we have big questions to answer, like, for example, what is the vision of flights that's gonna be in the next one or two years? Right? Yeah. And then, yeah, so there's all these big questions, all this 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? Yeah. In fact, I think that's also where it's fun, right?

Darren Yong Lee  07:36
Especially since, like, we have to convince our stakeholders that whatever we plan to do has value.

Han Xi Lee  07:41
Yeah, and not just business value. And of course as designers we always want to strive for, like, what's the best user experience for our users. And I think that shows in whatever we do, right, that we always try to balance our user experience. What helps our users as well as brings business value for the company?

Darren Yong Lee  07:58
Exactly. Since we ourselves are travelers as well, we want to imagine a future where, you know, Agoda is able to meet these needs. And there's a lot that we can think about in terms of shaping a travel platform. So I think it's really an interesting space to be in this time.

Rachel Hou  08:17
As a traveler, I definitely agree that what you mentioned, like, yeah, I can, I wanted to imagine like one thing Agoda could be the one hub where I can use on everything, everything for my travel needs. Yeah, it's such a big, such a big, yeah, big green.

Darren Yong Lee  08:36
Yeah, currently, I feel like the experience is also a bit, um, sometimes 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 do your research. We want to ease that pain - that user pain - so that they can just focus on the travel itself.

Han Xi Lee  08:59
Yeah, and that's where the trips theme comes in, right? Like how we want to bring convenience to our users as they go along that trip.

Darren Yong Lee  09:06
Exactly. So one of the other challenges that I face in Agoda, or like, specifically the Trips team, is that we have, like, more stakeholders to, to align with, because Agoda is a big company, and we're touching, like, pages across the entire funnel or across different funnels, 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 or 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.

Yuki Nishida  10:06
Do you feel like having a lot of these meetings and sync-ups is actually eating your time of actually designing?

Darren Yong Lee  10:12
It does, actually. I know it's important. Like, all these meetings and things are, like, important for us to get alignment. And so we have to be very tactful about it. Are these meetings actually necessary? Could they be in the form of an email or a Slack message, or we can even make things and 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.

Yuki Nishida  10:48
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 dev efforts that we have is limited, of course resources is very limited with every project. But I think this takes that to another level, and kind of really having to identify where's 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 will this actually fit in? And I think I've slowly began to get accustomed to that fact where every little ideas 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 roadmaps. 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-convergent-divergent 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 ...

Rachel Hou  12:19
I'm hearing all the fun and challenging. What about some of the highlights in the team since you guys worked in it?

(Pang) Chutimon Tangtanaporn  12:29
I think they previously we have a shopping cart, like visioning and brainstorming, right? And they like there's a lot of fun in the team kind of, like, gather all the designers or even like, have some research team PMs and everyone to, to brainstorm, what the product will look like for our customer. Yeah, you have anything?

Darren Yong Lee  12:55
Yes. So like, like you mentioned, cart just launched, to our users out there. And we believe that it'll be a good lever and help, you know, our users consolidate and like use it as a tool to decide on the accommodations. And we are still planning on know how the future of Agoda as a travel platform will be like. So there's lots of visioning work that we're doing. And I believe we've come a long way, and seeing how we're given that space to go and explore and imagine the future of Agoda 5 to 10 years from now. Right? It's kind of scary thought, but also exciting at the same time.

Yuki Nishida  13:37
I'm going to abuse my my card as a person that works on travel platforms as well. I'm 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 therein 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.

Han Xi Lee  14:37
Oh, and on top of that, I think that lends to how we backup our ideas with insights, right? Whether it's qualitative or quantitative insights, we don't just like come up with ideas. And we don't just think that as a product designer, 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 Agoda and, of course, the qualitative insights that we get from interviews with users, and then use these to backup 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 head in in the next few years.

Darren Yong Lee  15:14
And yeah, like, I think what is so splendid about you know, working on this as well is that, as well as Han Xi mentioned, we get to work with lots of people, right, especially our team of like 50-plus designers. We interact with the Core Accommodations funnel, also design systems team. Everyone is willing to give feedback - and good actionable feedback at that. So at times we do collaborative whiteboarding sessions, where everyone's just putting down ideas, and we don't limit ... everyone's opinion matters. So that's why such high volume sessions are important because we want to get everyone's perspective. So, it doesn't matter if you're a junior or a lead because we take everything into consideration, and also a big team. So no team is working in silo. We have the shared goal of making Agoda, like, you know, the best travel platform we can ever be.

Rachel Hou  16:12
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 balance is?

(Pang) Chutimon Tangtanaporn  16:23
Oh, basically for Flight team, as as you know, we are working hard, right? And coffee and tea has become a part of our life. So we can kind of like create like coffee or tea sessions in the afternoon or in the evening. So just for people to share about the life and talk rather than like working all day. Yeah. It's kind of like get to know people and and I think that is a fun session as well. And and I think Han Xi you joined our Flight bowling as well, right?

Han Xi Lee  17:01
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.

Yuki Nishida  17:15
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 or even from like the develop ... Development team, as well as Product team. But I think at Agoda, we kind of believe that at from our hearts, and we 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.

Darren Yong Lee  18:10
Yeah, I definitely agree. Like, I think it's important for us to, you know, not only learn about the people around us, in ... on your 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, who hang out, do those activities like badminton, pottery, even muay Thai together.

Rachel Hou  18:36
So, for the next question, is mostly for our listeners who are interested in joining Agoda. We wanted to know that what type of person would enjoy tackling problems on your team?

Han Xi Lee  18:49
I think first and foremost definitely someone who embraces and enjoys solving ambiguous problem spaces. 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's 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 enough start that we can all work towards yet break down into phases to implement. Yeah, and slowly evolve these designs over time.

Darren Yong Lee  19:24
On top of the like these 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 Han Xi 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. Even if not everyone agrees with it, you try because that's how Agoda is ... we experiment with everything, and we look at the data afterwards to see if that solution is valid or not. And we make improvements from then, forward.

(Pang) Chutimon Tangtanaporn  20:01
Yeah, I think one thing for me that I learned in Agoda so far, and I think like working in Agoda and, and especially with the new products 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,

Rachel Hou  20:34
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 this in this big organization.

Han Xi Lee  20:47
Okay, so last but not least, I think you really would need to love working on zero-to-one projects because this is the team where new product funnels will be introduced, right? So we might be building a new product, and then 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.

Darren Yong Lee  21:08
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 like bias in your work. And also, they will be able to pinpoint, like, flaws over edge cases in software works.

Rachel Hou  21:33
And okay, that's our time today. Thank you all for joining us. And thanks for Yuki for being part of the interview as well.

Yuki Nishida  21:42
Always lovely to be here.

Rachel Hou  21:44
And thank you Han Xi, Pang and Darren. Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying 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.

Yuki Nishida  22:04
And if you want to learn more about the work of the Design team at Agoda visit agoda.design. Thanks again for listening and hope to see you in our next episode.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai