2018 - 2021 | Bukalapak
Intro
In 2018, we had to take a hard look; there were many misalignments, unclear problems when building products, and the outcome was not so great. While the company had been going well for the last 10 years, the successful outcome was not always intentional. We wanted to improve this.
Co-creation session to identify pain points
The problem landscape
To better understand the problem, I initiated a co-creation session with everyone from each function — marketing, legal, product, business, engineering, design, and data — to share their pain points during the discovery and development phases. There are two problem space we want to tackle: (1) Products built base on the unvalidated assumptions (hunches), and (2) The silos creates misalignment
This landscape illustrates the extreme. Not all the team operate like this.
Big Intent
Challenge around alignment & collaboration
The pilot
We brought human-centered toolkits to improve team alignment and did a small experiment. We joined two teams who are open to enhancing their collaboration. The feedback was positive, and the team agreed that the alignment was far better. That serves as our foundation to get a bigger investment.
After the team practices this toolkit and adopt the mindset. The team expressed positive reactions and felt their alignment had been improved. Even though the projects' outcome was not on the level that we wanted to achieve. This qualitative feedback gave us confidence to move forward.
“We should do this sooner, so our team can align what outcome we aim and have a better discussion.” Business Development
“This is the first time I felt I'm on the same page with my PM from the get-go. I want to learn more about this.” User Researcher
“The intent statement was brilliant. It helped to align different perspective to everyone during the product development” Data scientist
“There were moments I felt the activity is a bit repetitive. But, I feel our team identified the real user problem.” Product Manager
Scaling it
After the small success from the pilot, we wanted to scale this mindset and practice to the larger scale in our company. We started by influencing the design team as the first approach.
Setting up vision
We rallied the concept of building alignment as the primary theme to the design team. We wanted to influence the organization-wide through designers.
Enabling people through bootcamp
With everyone excited about the vision, we held a Bootcamp series where I spent my time empowering the team to try the toolkit and mindset within the real context. Our goal was to enable them to practice it in their team. After a while, people from Product and Technology joined by interest.
The outcome
This Bootcamp series empowers some people to gain enough confidence to practice the human-centered mindset and toolkit in their team. A few still don't have the confidence yet. Each of the managers uses their unique approach on how to empower them. We started to see a more collaborative environment around the company.
120 people joined the bootcamp
97.1% found this bootcamp practical
Based on post-bootcamp survey
Implementation
When people started practicing the co-creation, we started to see a transformative change in our day-to-day culture. The discussion will be more on the customer, people start to ask why.
The team defining their customer journey
Leadership practicing a co-creation method
Design systems team co-create with the users
The team defining their user intent
The buyer team defining their assumptions together
Card to remind practicioner
Observe! Field study
Empower company to access the customer insights
Our co-creation framework
Outcome & Learnings
From requirement hand-off to co-creation
From feature-first to customer problem-first
From work in silos to multidisciplinary collaboration
From high-risk launch to small iterative learnings
This is an ongoing effort!
As we implemented this for more than two years, we witnessed a drastic change that leads to some successes. Most of our effort leads to a huge chunk of our company to adopt this mindset and practice the toolkits. More team shares their success stories internally.
One of the biggest changes is when the business team started to reach out to the research team more and more – they collaborate to define the strategy, which enabled teams not to start their project from the old-fashioned requirement. Instead, when the risk is high, they will align their hypothesis and validate it with the customers.
I've learned that many people are trapped in the step-by-step process; they blindly follow the steps and forget to answer the most critical question in their context. This framework enables teams to align and reflect continually. The other challenge we're working on right now is the confidence to be the facilitator of this practice; many understand the impact but reluctant to be the facilitator.
Nevertheless, this is an ongoing effort that the team will always foster. We still need to influence more people in the company. But this culture is starting to infused to our tactical level.