A look into the life at Koala
My start as a digital intern working at Koala
On December 16, 2019, I started my journey as a Digital Intern in Koala’s Digital Team. I was really excited about this unique opportunity and to learn what lies ahead of me and my future into the world of technology.
During my first week at Koala, I was introduced to Koala’s mission and was slowly learning about the culture and the people of the company. As Koala’s website states its mission is
At Koala we believe in improving habitats, inside and outside of your home. We do this through donations to wildlife conservation or by minimising consumption by creating simple, well-made products that are built to last and have a reduced environmental footprint.
Because after all, the world is our habitat; and it’s the only one we’ve got.
Koala gives donations with every mattress sold to protect and restore koala habitats around Australia through their partnership with WWF and other koala charities. For every purchase of their new Koala Sofa, Koala also funds critical research to prevent the extinction of the green turtle in partnering with WWF. Thus by being this environmentally conscious e-commerce retailer and helping preserve the environment, they are able to lead by example.
Koala also provides a very supportive and engaging workplace where people are provided with autonomy, comfort, and flexibility to do the best work possible. They also have weekly yoga sessions, ping pong, boxing, social basketball competitions and weekly hangout sessions (called Fireside Friyays) for the people to bond, destress and even share cross-team knowledge.
Meeting the Digital Team
I met the Digital Team on my first day of work and it has been an absolute pleasure getting to know all the different people that have helped make Koala what it is today. The digital team at Koala is made up of different teams that focus on specific parts of the Koala’s digital system. The optimize team is composed of the Product Manager Matt and the frontend developers Adelaine, Byron and Kevin, their Japan-based frontend developer, working remotely from their Japan office. The platform team has Product Manager Nada and the frontend developers Indrek and Kristo. Both teams work with UX/UI designers Ary, Pete, and Kaoru for the design and development of the website. The Gumleaf team is composed of the Product Manager Azadeh and the Backend Developers Madhu, Andrew and Sankar both of whom work remotely. The team is managed by the Head of Technology Richard Bremner, who leads everyone and monitors the team’s wellbeing.
The digital team does daily stand-ups, where everyone goes through the different tasks that people have been working on as well as analyze the team metrics to determine the impact they are making to the business.
Through my first two weeks, I sat with different people in the different departments at the Koala digital team and was shown how they operate. I first learned about Google Analytics and how to analyze the website visitors’ behavior and to identify the potential areas of growth. I also learned about e-commerce metrics like conversion rate, add to cart rate, event tracking and the deployment process at Koala.
I was also exposed to Gumleaf, the management system developed and used by Koala to manage orders, track shipping and provide an easier experience for the people working all around the company to manage the order fulfillment process easily.
I loved learning about something new every day and was taught by people who were experienced and passionate about their field.
My First Task
My first task as a Digital Intern was to develop the homepage hero for the upcoming Boxing Day Sale. This task provided me with the opportunity to get hands-on experience with the code and how to develop a component for the website. I first went through the code which is used for the website in order to understand the structure and the format of code used. I had some previous experience working with JavaScript and CSS but this was my first opportunity to work with SASS and Vue, a JavaScript Framework to develop single page applications as well as keeping track of how it looked on various devices such as PCs, laptops, phones, and tablets.
I also worked on creating an animation using purely CSS that the users would see as they enter the website to give them a ‘surprise and delight’, one of Koala’s company values. This animation consisted of blocks falling from the top to the bottom of the screen. This opportunity gave me a chance to learn how to use CSS animations to design elements on a website for them to stand out. While developing this animation I was struggling with how to make this animation occur smoothly as the blocks were falling from different heights and were not optimized properly. I was able to fix this problem by working with Adelaine by using an idea recommended by Kevin and learning about using transform instead of the top in SASS for the block positions, in order to optimize the code better.
In the end, I was able to successfully finish the tasks which were given to me on time.
My future at Koala
For the next few weeks, I plan on working on helping develop the frontend interface of Gumleaf to help make the user experience easier. I am also excited to learn more about the different roles throughout the digital team.
My time has Koala has been an amazing and rewarding experience and I am excited to see what comes next! :)
