 There's really no pressure of me opening up this session and then setting the standard for everyone to see how to open the conference, but well, first of all, thank you for the UX Society for organizing this very big event and then inviting me for the session. The starting point that Khalid was sharing about what are the things that we're going to talk today is the future of UX. It sounds really big and I really had no idea what sort of the future that we're looking at, but what I do know is that I'm a product research lead in Gojek and I've been there for two and a half years now. We changed a lot in the past three, four years and I've been one of the part of the transformation as well and perhaps what I can do for you is that not showing you the future of the UX really had no idea about that, but as a researcher, as a product researcher, you know, I'm going to share you what learnings and what sort of things that we learned about when we're trying to evolve continuously in terms of having a team and then also building the capacity that we're trying to push forward and then perhaps expanding as well in terms of our impact. A little bit of context about this. This is Gojek's new logo. Hopefully you guys know this. Hopefully you guys are aware that Gojek is currently up and running in Singapore right now. We came with this new logo just I think four, five, six months ago and we rebranded everything to occupy the story behind our development as a product. So we started off I think six years ago around 2015, 2014, 2015 as an app that exclusively does mobility service. So we had this ride and car service, ride-hailing service for motorcycle and cars and the whole idea is that we're building it on an on-demand app so that people can heal something and then have the driver partners to pick them up on the needed time. There was a basic premise of Gojek for around six months before we expanded in the course of another years to having more than 20 plus business units. And the whole idea is that we expanded not only working on mobility service but then we basically do every on-demand service that's imaginable to be done in Indonesia within one app. And so we had let's say on the left part is the mobility and logistics service. We also had entertainment, we had also a digital payment service and then we also had food livery, shopping livery and even a massage service that coming to your house without you having to book outside of your phone. And so that's the story. And then I guess what transformation has been looking like inside the company is that everyone's been sort of like frantic about maintaining the sort of comprehension of how big is our product now or how big is our impact now within the market. And we've been expanding this not only in Indonesia but also in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand as well and you know how do we actually make sense all this big transformation that's happening only in four years time. And so I guess there are three challenges internally within the organization and then it's definitely felt by the UX research team as well as I'm gonna tell you after this. But the whole idea is that as a big giant business in Indonesia as one of the unicorn as like we said before is that we do have the biggest, the most primary need of the business to scale up in itself. And then we also need to leap from the competition as it's already been said today. And so the sort of like starting point for this is that we do need to think everything in terms of like how efficient it is, how impactful it is. And then do we actually sort of like look forward to the North Star metrics to move and then see if we can optimize everything again in the next iteration. And so there's always the mindset that we're pushing in Gojek. And then the second challenge especially for UX researchers is that we do have a very rigid and rigorous sort of like approach towards science in terms of like we do understand what are the data infrastructures need to be built for us to understand the users. And then also we need, we've done a lot of like experiments that we know what's been happening with our users and then how to actually treat them to make sure that we're optimizing some of the interaction and whatnot. The last one as well is that it adds down to we're even having speed as one of the values that we hold close to within the company. And so these are the sort of like three starting points of what Gojek looks like and the three areas that me as a researcher needs to sort of like come terms with because it's how everyone does it work in Gojek. And so the starting point for me was that in 2017 and so I joined as a UX researcher and then what we were signing up for this 10 members of the UX research team was that we're doing all research related thing for design and product development related issues. And we were previously centralized in terms of like we sit together and then we work on different products depends on our bandwidth and capacity. We haven't really embedded ourselves within different products or different business verticals. And you know we seemed we felt it's not pretty close because you know like we were on this thing together. But then we realized that with all these previous challenges, it's actually hard for us to scale ourselves. And then there are some, you know, downsides for us to not be able to cope and contextualize ourselves within the changes that's been said previously. I think the three challenges that we had just to sum up is that we don't have a good distribution of skills among products. Let's say if we were focusing ourselves much more on doing research for let's say mobility, then it's not going to be the same for us doing research for payments and then also for food liberty. It needs more expertise. It needs more also embedded knowledge about what's been happening with an industry, what's been happening with the sort of like competitive realm of the specific products and what not. And we haven't really built deep knowledge within the products itself. And so it's hard for us to actually scale our impact within the specific products because well we're trying to take out everything together. And then second one is for researchers, the conventional ones, the conventional starting points at least like what's been happening in Gojek was that we were very much heavy on qualitative sort of like tools as a way for us to achieve our goals. And I wouldn't say it's the wrong thing. I wouldn't say that we cannot just do qualitative but then what's been happening to us is that it got beaten up by how data is actually being stronger and stronger. And then we cannot integrate what we've been knowing from our researchers with the data that we already had as a fact or as an evidence within the company. And so we shied away. We shied away in terms of not thinking that we could be more impactful. And well the idea that we cannot always be conclusive about our research results made us even further from the product team or the things that we're serving for. The third one is that we are on a battle when we're talking about speed and we're talking about like tight business goals. We're always facing the battle of do we know which ones to take, which are our battles or what kind of questions do we need to answer right now and what kind of questions that we need to answer for the longer sustainment of the business. And so those are the sort of like words that happening within the team as well. How to expand ourselves so that we can answer all these challenges and then what sort of maturity, what sort of mindsets do we need to own for us to actually be able to scale up as needed. And so these are sort of like the learnings that I wanted to share about what's been happening in the past two, three years in my involvement in the research team. And so we sort of like changed branding as well because we're not necessarily saying ourselves as a UX research team but then we're integrating with a bigger research team as a research and insights team. And then we from 10 expanded to 62 members on the research team. We hold more expertise and then well hopefully as we can show you later, as I can show you later, we build more impact, we build more software connection with the product team to contextualize ourselves in our practice. Yeah, these are basically how it kind of looked like. The idea is that we're not starting in terms of sort of like what methods do we bring into our research? No, we come up with expertise and then we combine it inside. So we have like different researchers, different shapes of researchers, different creatures of researchers that goes within our product. We have qualitative researchers, we have mixed method ones that does surveys and data analysis. We have also survey scientists. We have design researchers that look forward more into sort of like services and strategy. We have market intelligence, market researchers and whatnot. And the whole idea is that we're trying to strengthen ourselves to have a value proposition that's strong enough for the department to be contextual within the company. And then see if we can actually mature ourselves while we measure what are the impacts that we are doing for the company as well. Definitely 60 people, if you can see, it's a lot, right? And then the story in itself is that we're not only expanding our maturing in scale in numbers, but what I'm trying to also share to you guys is that how do we actually define our voice? How do we actually mature in terms of like individual and well-being and whatnot? And so these are the three principles that I want to share to you guys on how to, you know, what learnings do I have on maturing, on expanding from, you know, like 10 people team into 17 to 52 or 55 or more even researchers within this year. And so first one is starting by defining what the business values for your team within the company. Second one is you might want to build bridges with our functions, with other teams that are neighbouring to yours. And then the third one is that if you have a roadmap of how your transformation is going to look like, plan it, make milestones out of it, and then communicate it to everyone that's needed to be communicated. How does it look like? So the first one is that this is the challenge for UX researchers to be able to be impactful in the company, to be able to contribute and then do things that we want to do in a business and design setting. We have different sort of arrangements. There never is a single silver bullet to answer everything for us. And then the idea is that it depends on how the company is moving as one. How is the sort of connection between teams and between products? What are the silos that need to be broken and whatnot? And so what I wanted to say is that there's no real answer to the question of what does a UX researcher need to contribute and focus on. And so these are the challenges that are happening in my company as well. The question is, this one, we refrain ourselves from working and doing research and ask ourselves, what are the impact that we want to make? What are the business values that we want to make? And does it align with the company's views about what we should do? And then does it sustainable? And so these are the questions that we want to answer ourselves first. And it might be something that is more up your street as well, to answer what kind of business values that we want to own and then does it sustainable? And so as a context to show our way of thinking about how do we define our business values, is that we look at the development of products in the last two years. We had two major redesigns. We had both branding and both the whole UX of the application. And then starting from only two products into 20 plus products, we on average have one point to new product lines a year. And so the development has been very, very, very fast. And then we've been trying to do a lot of things in this four years time. And then what's been happening as well is that we build things based on hunches. We build things based on the availability that we have as a company. But then it doesn't always translate to the right thing, right? And so what we sort of like tell ourselves with the research is that we wanted the company to be able to save time and then focus on the right thing because we have access to the right insights. We have access to information from the external ones and integrating it with data as well so that we can tell the people in the company tell our stakeholders, tell the product team as well, you know, these are the direction that we think everyone should make. And then these are the rationale as to why it's the answer. And I guess from the context that we have very, very tight competition, saving time is actually saving the company's money. And it's definitely something that we want to do first and foremost because otherwise we're not doing the right thing. And then you're like, we might be beaten up in the race by our competitors. And so these are the things that we're trying to communicate within our company on what values a US researcher has in the company. And so these are the two building blocks that we're trying to implement within the researchers as well is that we want to focus both on evidence and empathy. Of course, empathy is something that's at least for me personally overused in terms of what do we need to use with empathy? What do we need to communicate? And what does it actually mean for a person to be empathetic? And so what I'm trying to believe is that empathy is something that can't be overlooked but it needs to be defined clearly. What we really think about, what empathy means is that it's an emotional capacity that you have as an individual, as a team, as a company for you to understand what is the things that might be done by our users if we treat them by X. And then what are the outcomes that might happen in terms of behavior of our Y users if we move our feature development from Y to Z, let's say. And so those kind of things, we're building hunches about what's happening out to our users and the thing about hunches is that it needs to be trained over time because you have to know what are the trials and errors that you've done in the past and then you need to know if your calculations are getting better and better. And so that's the first one. And then the second one is evidence in terms of if we do have a way to inspire people through empathetic inspirations, you know, what are the evidence that we can bring it to the table for us to be able to make sure that they understand the things that have been happening to our users and then they can act on it, basically. One of the examples is, I think this is pretty recent. And so one of the CEOs that we have in our company, as well seen here, using what's the name, Angkot, Angkot is a local sort of conventional taxi minibus for people to commute. And it's not something that is very much tacky or very good. It's very, very much conventional and it's definitely not comfortable. But the whole idea of us as a researcher taking our CEO for a ride in Angkot in a heated way, definitely there's no AC here, is that we want our CEO to learn about how people actually commute within the different parts of the city, what are the hassles and what are the gaps that we can fill in as a mobility service to win the committing trips and then win the shares of our users' minds in terms of using Gojek for commuting. So this is one. And then the follow up is, you know, coming up with the evidence, I see that we've got a lot of beams, but the whole idea is that, I don't know if it's happening a lot to you guys, but in Gojek, when speed is something that campaigns all over again, we've experienced a lot of things that were, you know, like, upon two minutes before decision is made, a product manager or the center came upon to us and asked, you know, do you have something about this? Because we are so keen to make decisions very much now. And we also, we definitely don't have that, right? And then the second one is as well, there are some brewing of a blame game in terms of like, why something is bad and then, you know, like, research can be very much a good part in that because we provide information for people to make decisions. And so these things are happening, not necessarily all the drama happening a lot, but, you know, like, there are instances where we can actually become part of this fiasco and then, you know, we do need to optimize things, right? And then what we did as a researcher is that we're not only doing projects in terms of, like, things that are asked by our stakeholders or things that are initiated by us, but then we take the diligence of us to document everything and then find out learnings that's happening within a specific, you know, product or business unit or whatnot to make sure that we can come out with a repository. So it looks like this, right? As beautiful as it is, it's something that is very, very much functional in terms of, like, us sharing to the whole company, even not even our direct stakeholders, because everyone should did it and should be public, is that our research repository in terms of, like, what do we know about X things? We can come up with a director, we can come up with tags on what kind of research it is, or we can come up with filtering through product verticals or methodologies and whatnot. And the idea is that we have a one-stop solution for everyone who has came and asked us about, like, hey, do you know something about this because we don't have much time but we want to answer, really, really answer this X thing because they want to make a decision. And so this is already the idea behind us coming up with this research repository. It's public and accessible by everyone within the company. And, you know, like, you can find out anything within it as long as we've done it. So the whole idea is for us to make every insight accessible and then it doesn't necessarily translate to us doing the same thing all over again because we got knowledge missed, a loss in translation, that is. And the second one is building bridges is something that we are very, very much keen of because internally, as a department, we do have people from different backgrounds, right? We do have data analysts, we do have survey scientists, qualitative researchers, design researchers, UX researchers. And then what we wanted to do is that we think a lot about, like, what are they actually the decision making situations that are present within our company? What sort of, like, things that our stakeholders need to answer on a daily or, I don't know, like, regular basis? And then how do we actually infuse ourselves within it? And so if we think about it, right, we have design decisions and something that is done by designers and then, well, I mean, it's going to be collated with the product managers as well, but then we have different levels of product decisions of, you know, what features do we need to prioritize, how are we going to do it and whatnot. And then even up to the business decisions. And by doing this sort of, like, mapping, we do know as well, you know, like, how do actually these decisions came to be made, right? And so we saw what are the contributing teams that are dealing with all these questions on a regular basis and then we integrate ourselves within it. And it looks simple here, but it definitely is not. This is something that we're trying to do even until this point of time is that we want to make sure that we can put in ourselves in the decisions of both design, product and business and then integrate ourselves as well in the teams that are sort of, like, providing the information for these decisions to be made. And so what are the challenges on that as well is that as a traditional sort of, like, research practice, we do have limitations in our data source in the way that we frame our findings and the way that we frame our study. And, you know, like, what are the tools that we are coming up with. It might be very much different with what the data team has gone. And then there are definitely a language barrier for us to actually be integrating ourselves within these different teams. And so what we need to do and what we're trying to say to ourselves as the researchers as well is that there's no single way for us to answer questions about UX or questions about how users interact with our product or even questions about, you know, like, what market we sort of need to answer. But what we as a team, these 50 people, you know, like, agreed on ourselves is that we need to de-learn on ourselves. We need to understood that method is not something that we own but it's something that should be neutral. We do need some expertise to begin with, but we do need to know as well is that people don't see decisions from what methods it, you know, like we're using for the information finding, but it only depends on the answer. And so becoming method neutral is something that we're trying to push more and more. And, whoops, sorry. Yeah, one of the case study that we came out with is that if you think about a user journey, we do know that there are different aspects or different variables that came out like this, right? You know, like how people feel about things, how our user see the different stages of using our products and whatnot. And, you know, like, what are they thinking, feeling and doing and whatnot, and, you know, like, what are the peak and valley points of this experience for us to be able to visualize what are the things that need to be improved, you know, products. But what we tried to do internally as well is that we sort of, like, wanted to know what are the data that actually reflects the faces or the hassles that users feel when they're using our product, right? We do know, through our interviews, that there are ups and downs within our products when it's being experienced. But then, what are the things, what are the sort of, like, evidence that we can use for us to prioritize which are the things that need to be well prioritized? And so, we tried to capture a lot of things within this, you know, like, different set of journey. What are the user funnel look like and then do we have some customer support data to give background to the issues that people are having on the later part? We have reviews, we have satisfaction scores and whatnot. And then we even look at the social media listening data. And then the whole idea for this is we want us to be able to prioritize which issues are we trying to think and which solutions do we need to come up first. And by doing all these data-driven, sort of, like, user journey, we are able to sort of like prioritize with the design team, with the PMs and the business team as well, about the magnitude of some issues and then seeing that there's actual evidence of something is happening and needs to be optimized. And then, well, it provides a new hypothesis for us doing more user research as well. And the third one, the third challenge that we're seeing within our development is that moving or, you know, transforming from a 10-person team into a 50-plus department is not easy and people might feel left behind and, you know, like, if we don't communicate the change, there are a lot of costs that we need to face in terms of, like, feeding people and challenging people onto new sort of, like, territories and then ensuring that they can actually excel doing that. And so, well, within this set of, let's say, researchers that we have right now, we do know that a lot of people came from, let's say, different backgrounds. There are survey scientists that are fully trained as a statistician. There are design researchers, like people starting from anthropology or psychology or whatnot, and then, well, I mean, qualitative researchers from computer science, even data analysts that have very much little background in terms of, like, researching humans and whatnot. And we do know that we're very solid as a team, but then how do we actually make sure that the cross-training or cross-learning between the teams are happening? And so what we've been trying to do in the past, like, one-and-a-half years is that as we move along with the many members within our department, we want to invest in people. We want to invest in the members that we have because we want to nurture them to become a full-fledged researchers and then making sure that the passing of information, the passing of knowledge within our team is not, you know, it's seamless, right? And what's happening is that we've done a lot of, like, internal sessions where the whole idea is that for us to first share capacities, share knowledge, but also share learnings about, you know, like, what's been happening within the products. And so we're, again, not studying this by making sure that someone owning an expertise or whatnot, but then we, if someone has, you know, like, an interest over something, we pretty much encourage them to share it to the team as well. And then, you know, like, making sure that it's something that is applicable for anything that is done by the researchers in their own team. And so the first one, let's say, you know, like, we're doing a sharing session about how to actually use service design for X-type of research or how to actually do the quantitative research user journey that I showed you before. And then, you know, like, the whole idea for Gojek is that we have the triangle of, the golden triangle of users, let's say, you know, like, we don't only have the customers, but then we do have driver partners and merchants to begin with. And so they're different beasts, by the way, and then the whole idea is that how do we actually ensure that our research are catered for this different set of users. And the last one is basically also doing data analytics trainings just to make sure that, you know, we know what's the logic behind data and then how to actually utilize the data that we have as a company for our hypothesis-building and research and then making it something that is sort of like reflexive within our team as well so we can use it as a tool. And the second one is, you know, how do we also share cross-learning from what we've done in different teams, right? Because as we told you, we're sort of like dividing ourselves within different embedded teams. And so we're embedding, let's say, 10 people in the transport team. We embedded 12 or more in the food delivery team and payments and so on and so on. And then we can get pretty much silent in terms of what we can share on to each other and then what learnings that we can have that is needed for other teams to, you know, not do the same mistake as well. And so cross-learnings are something that we are doing pretty much religiously just to make sure that on a weekly basis we know what learnings that we need, what are the mistakes that we've made, what are the hacks within research that we want people to learn from or something that needs to be avoided. And so all this cross-learning is something that is part of, like, a culture within our research team just to make sure that we are doing something not only for the best of ourselves individually but also the best for our department. And that's basically the three challenges and considerations we tried within the past two and a half years in Gojek and then just to summarize on what's been happening is that first of all we tried to define what are the stories of us, what are the values that we need to bring within the company and then how do we actually communicate it and the learnings that we have is that we started off a very explicitly UX research team and then we wanted to have more impact and make sure that we're indispensable and then integrated within the decision-making within the company and so what we're trying to do is that we decide our value needs to infuse into saving time and then making sure that people are focusing their efforts on the right thing to do and coming up with both empathy and evidence to ensure that our stakeholders are understanding what are the implications of our impact and then the second one is that you know like building also bridges to different functions, the easiest one is the data team but also we have more bridges with the business analyst team, with the market research team and the idea behind that is that we want to learn as much as them, we want to learn the methods of not only doing primary research but also data analysis, we want to also learn about how you know like people who are using the same way code and then come to fruition when it comes to you know like our coding or interaction and what not and so the principle behind that is that we want everyone to be method neutral and then de-learn about something that might be they've already come as an expertise but then you know like using other tools to learn and making sure that we're neutral in terms of like doing our research and the third one is communication, if we do have a roadmap and if we do have thinking of like how do we going to evolve as a team making sure that people are thought you know like thought over and then we know what are the implications within our members, within our communication to the bigger company making sure that the change management is thought over as well it's something that we're trying to do in the first place and internally what we did was that we're investing in the people in itself because we don't want to like have big turnovers and not investing in people and seeing people as like UX researchers or team members as indispensable but we do all the investments of like we share the cross learnings we share the capacities we ensure that people are sort of like trained to become more full-fledged researchers and make sure that we are one as a team and we get stronger each and every day and having the same impact across the different products that we're serving right now and that is basically it, thanks very much thank you very much so thank you very much Sakti if you haven't already put in your questions you can go to menti.com I see that there are already quite a number of questions I didn't expect people discovered it I'm going to pick some of the top voted questions that we have and ask Sakti so the first one that was upvoted a lot was how do you define UX researcher and design researcher and what are the key differences if any between the two alright so that is one yeah I don't think there's sort of like easy way to distinguish between the two but what we did try to sell within our research team as well is that for UX research to become more focused and impactful within the company is that we're going to focus more on design interactions we're going to focus more on sort of like ensuring the flow is tested within the users and whatnot and so we deal a lot with designers both interaction designers and product designers just to make sure that the designs, the interactions the flows are something that has been tested with the users and we have a very good way of sanity checking everything just to make sure that we're not shipping something that is actually not making sense and so that's for UX research but for sort of like the design research we're trying to pull that up sort of like thinking more in a holistic view and then using all the jargons about design as a strategy or sort of like service design and we're thinking about how we actually make interactions with our user or consumers because if we're thinking about design research we're thinking more about the offline and online experience as well and so making sure that it's a seamless sort of like steps from zero to finish for the users is something that is on the capacities of a design researcher we don't actually have a design researcher per se within the company but we do see design research as a capacity that we want to own as a collective within the research team and so that's how we're doing it. Okay thank you so I see that everyone has been furiously upvoting questions which is good. Let's have a look at the next top voted question. How do we convince your leaders that user research saves the company's time when is there an understanding that it actually takes time? Yes that's actually I don't know yes I think the question about impact is something that is not really right to be answered by researchers because we cannot connect ourselves to let's say company impacts of bringing in money bringing in users or let's say coming up with a revenue. It's a very hard question to answer or to solve because well we're not very much direct with it and then what we did is that we're trying to see ourselves in two ways so as a researcher we come up with project results or research results and we can see that as a product right we're thinking that all the research repository all the let's say foundational research that we've done for a product is something that we own as our own baby and so by seeing that as a metric as well let's say you're setting up the goals of how many metrics that we how many foundational research that we can come up in a quarter or in a half years time is something that we hold on as a metric definitely we don't know if it actually saved some or not but then we can also show what are the things that are not happening if research is not integrated with the product development making and so by giving examples of the things that can go wrong if research is not involved if research is not thoroughly integrated across the product development pipeline is something that we're trying also to do not to point fingers that these are the distinction between when research is integrated and not integrated and then we also take pride in us measuring how research members are utilized and what does it take how many hours even for us to be able to come up with research results and then provide it to the stakeholders and so that's the main thing and also we measure the satisfaction of our stakeholders not in a regular sort of like basis but we do see that as a metric that we are keen to improve as well you know we're collaborating with product managers designers we're collaborating with even engineers as well and then we do want to know how satisfied are them in terms of like using our quote-unquote service but you know collaborating with us so that we know how to improve as a team as well okay and I guess one final question we have a lot but you know we have a very full agenda to get to so a lot of your presentation talked about scaling given that it's a unicorn company and just for research itself you're going from 10 people to 50 like 50 is probably the size of some mid-sized start-ups these days so the question was about the process of going from 10 to 50 and also how did you actually convince stakeholders for you to keep growing your team yeah I guess the decision on you know like coming up with this many researchers is that it started off from the fact that we're trying to embed ourselves within our product teams and you know we would want to build knowledge over time about you know like what do we know about mobility what do we know about food delivery and payments and so on and we cannot really do that with you know like having 10 people alright and then so the decision for us to actually embed ourselves within the team is actually a starting point for us to scale in terms of number but also scale in terms of expertise because by embedding ourselves we do need to know that every research team that are embedded in products has the same or at least similar capacity in terms of like what we contribute to the products and then let's say we don't have any right calculation but let's say a minimum of researchers that are needed in a product is four let's say and seeing that we have 20 plus products it doesn't it kind of makes sense for us to actually evolve onto a 50 plus researchers but then it also started off with the understanding is from sort of like you know like we had different expertise and we don't have that many full-fledged researchers within Indonesia as a market let's say or you know like even in Southeast Asia perhaps as a full-fledged researchers that can be doing all the different things of data analysis, survey, qualitative design strategy and what not at the same time and so we try to divide it into like different key expertise sets and then having some experts on that area but making sure that we share it across the teams is something that's needed and so that's the reason for the number as well okay thank you thank you very insightful so a round of applause for Sakthi and we just like to present a token of appreciation to Sakthi for speaking today fancy thank you thank you Sakthi