Behind Great Product — Product Journey: Tokopedia x OVO
Behind the scenes of Tokopedia and OVO collaboration told by the team themselves in their own words
Have you ever wondered what’s the story behind Tokopedia and OVO collaboration? Stories like pains in the process, unexpected challenges, and accomplishments gained that are never told before to the public. On Wednesday evening, June 26th, Tokopedia held the 10th Behind Great Product event, inviting speakers from both Tokopedia and OVO to tell the insights and learnings from the integration in their own words. Our speakers are:
- Alfredo Setiabudi — AVP of Product at Tokopedia
- Firdila Sari — Head of Product Development at OVO
- Indri Yuanita — Head of Business Payment at Tokopedia
On-boarding new e-wallet payment method is no easy task for our speakers, especially when the payment option is directly affecting more than 90 million MAU of Tokopedia and must be available to more than 30 digital products inside Tokopedia. This is where their various background and experiences come in handy, Edo with his robotic engineering background, Firdila with her bank and media experience, and Indri with her customer care experience. Together they collaborate to provide the best experience to user, not only in terms of functionality, but also user experience and compliance.
Objective: Can you define your goal?
Like the second habit in Stephen Covey’s best-seller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, begin with end in mind, it is crucial and mandatory to have a well-defined objective. Specifically to this study case, there are 3 objectives, each belong to each stakeholders:
- By this integration, OVO and Tokopedia will be actively participating in actualizing Bank Indonesia’s and OJK’s mission: Cashless Society. A mission to bring more digital transaction in the Indonesian economic scene to reach financial inclusivity and decentralized economic growth across regions.
- For Tokopedia, this will allow user to experience more seamless payment flow. By activating OVO, user can now pay in just a couple of seconds, compare to manual transfer and offline payment method which could take minutes or even hours. This is huge improvement that will eventually lead to higher conversion.
- For OVO, Tokopedia gave them the opportunity to reach more Indonesian since Tokopedia is used by more than 90 million users each month. This will enable them to have a strong presence across the country, especially out side the cities area where regular OVO payment method is not accessible.
End-to-end integration process in just 2 months
Surprisingly, an integration for such massive scale can be done in just 2 months. This required an integration of a new payment option along with its activation flow, that can handle Tokopedia’s number of transaction per day. This meant the system must be able to handle millions of request per second just to show the OVO balance in Tokopedia’s app. According to Edo, none of this can be achieved without proper planning. He came up with an analogy:
A wise carpenter spent most of his time sharpening his axe before cutting the tree
- Step one for a good plan is to define the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). This is where Edo and Firdila spent countless meetings debating the MVP. The tricky part is the world “Viable”. To what extend can we agreed that this feature is viable for users. Edo argued that OVO points is a must for MVP, where Firdila thought otherwise to speed up the process. Eventually they reached a decision to include it, a good decision in fact since the use case of OVO points is very relevant inside Tokopedia
- Another big task is to think about every possible scenario of user journey. Interestingly in this case, even though the majority of user have both Tokopedia and OVO app, there are corner cases as illustrated below. All possibles scenarios must be handled to avoid customer insatisfaction.
- From tech perspective, Edo used Kanban method in order to keep everything organized and on track. For every big epic, can be breakdown into stories, that can be breakdown into individual tasks. This way, each engineer will have ownership of their task and everyone can keep track of each other, resulting in better communication especially if there is dependency.
- Quality is key, every possible journey or scenario has to be quality passed by the Test Engineers by both team. In this case, the amount of test case can reach to thousands. The number became so great because of various activation flow in 40+ different Tokopedia products. Each user that reach payment page might be in the state of OVO active, inactive, insufficient balance, and others. Now multiply that with all the digital products in Tokopedia and the case of user choose split payment method.
Track metrics and keep improving
Now that most of the groundwork has been done, it is time to keep track and iterate. In order to do this, it is essential to know which metrics to track and the success measurement.
- According to Indri, two north star metrics to monitor are TPV (Total Purchase Value) and MAU (Monthly Active User). Which means that by enabling OVO payment method, Tokopedia’s TPV should increase significantly now that payment has never been made so easy. With OVO, MAU also improved due to the fact that buying small ticket size product can use OVO points now. This will increase the user retention rate.
- Constant improvement and education cannot be neglected. Since this was a new feature that users were unfamiliar with, we kept educating user on how to use, activate, and prevent fraud. Especially that money is involved here, we must educate user to earn their hard-gained trust, knowing the fact that the majority of Indonesian market are not technology literate.
- The fact that Indonesia is a very young market, a lot of non tech-savvy user might be the victim of social engineering and fraud attempt. This is a very bad experience for a first time online user that might discourage them from doing online transaction altogether. One example to prevent this is have a warning message first in the form of an OTP message so that user does not share his/her OTP to anyone else.
Conclusion
Last but not least, a product is never perfect nor finished. We must constantly iterate and add improvement. Especially in an emerging market like Indonesia, there are still a lot of milestones ahead to be achieved. Just look at Paytm in India or Alipay in China, we still have plenty of rooms to improve. So keep watching on many more future features we have in our roadmap!
Interested in more content like this? Join us in the upcoming Behind Great Product event. Behind Great Product is a monthly event held in Tokopedia Tower, sharing stories and insights behind our products told by our very own Nakama, mainly from a product management perspective. So stay tuned!
