What I’ve Learned from Joining Traveloka Design During WFH (Work From Home)
How does it feel like to hop on board to a Southeast Asia’s leading tech company amidst a global pandemic?
In August 2020, I decided to leave Bandung, my home for the past 7 years, to come back to Jakarta. Having worked in Bandung’s close-knitted startup scene almost throughout my career, I felt like it was time for a change. I needed a new environment that has a room for me to grow and thrive further.
A series of job interviews later, I finally landed my dream role as a Product Copywriter at Traveloka Design. But I knew signing off the job offer was not the end of the challenge. Despite the cheering from my friends and family, I joined during a thrilling yet tricky time: it was 7 months into a pandemic, they just went through a major reorganization, and the office was being relocated. That means a lot of pressure to prove my worth and extended screen time to learn everything from scratch.
Up until now, I still haven’t stepped my foot into Traveloka HQ. That said, I would not trade my unique experience as a remote joiner with anything else. This article will bring you to the story of my first two months of working at Traveloka: navigating through the process, projects, people, and picking up things my own way from distance.
Observing the process
The idea of fast changes as a company grows, and things do move quickly at Traveloka. We simultaneously work on different projects and push out updates regularly in just 1–2 months’ time frame. To accommodate the pace, systems were established. Reports are neatly documented in one page, tools are neatly organized to accommodate the whole team, and the process is fully governed by a concept called Tricleloka.
On my first day, after a series of onboarding sessions through Google Meet, I was equipped with a checklist of everything I needed to catch up on. First, I had to get my hands on various tools: Miro for workshop and brainstorming, Figma for prototyping, Asana for task management, and 10,000ft for project resourcing.
After I got the knack out of the tools, came the project management tutorials (which I had to binge-watch for a whole week). And yes, everything is readily accessible at one self-service directory, which helped me pick it up independently at ease.
Among the things I learned on my first week, Traveloka product design development process called Tricleloka (Three Circles of Traveloka, pronounced tri•kel•lo•ka) was what I found the most enlightening. The process is very much based on Human-Centered Design (HCD) methodology.
In my previous working experience, I was not that unfamiliar with Agile methodology. It was also not the first time I heard about HCD. But taking the effort to constantly optimize and refine the work for our company is an entirely different thing, and I appreciate that.
Then, as weeks passed by, it was interesting to see how each phase in Tricleloka actually came into play. I finally saw how design projects were kicked off, how ideation workshops and discussions were held, how user testings were held, and how feedback was given until we agreed on a final design.
Once I went through all the phases, it became easier to see what role I should have taken in each phase. To be a useful member, I need to understand not only about what’s within my discipline of copywriting, but also much more about product design as a whole.
One more realization I had was that my design team does not only follow the process — they live by it. The HCD process encourages constant reiteration not only of the product, but also our ways of working and the process itself. I quickly noticed that my peers do not settle with results as they are; they constantly ask critical questions.
How should we restructure this? What challenge should we focus on next? How do our users’ contexts shift? Which principles should guide our decisions, and are they enough?
This habit eventually pushed me to rethink and explore better practices for my own works as well.
Diving into projects
Ever since the hiring process, I already knew that I was going to be placed in the Platform Design team. Working on the core of the product, the idea of being exposed to various stakeholders across business units in Traveloka was exciting.
When I finally joined, I was assigned to two missions in Platform: Universal Search (UNS), which develops one stop place for users to discover products, and Planning & Booking (P&B), which works on features related to user’s purchase intent. In terms of team structure, these two missions are quite different from one another as one has been around longer and involves more people than the other.
My first week was about swimming through sea of contexts, and I mostly learned about my team’s ongoing projects from their design briefs as well as their related reports. As most things can be easily accessed and read, only one big thing was left for me to pick up through meetings: adjusting to different team dynamics.
What I learned from being stretched to more than one mission, with various types of stakeholder, was that everyone has their own style of collaborating. For example, some prefer to monitor from afar while others hold syncs more often. Some like to give heads up while others involve people later on.
It took a while to figure out which approaches work better for whom, especially when the intricacies are not always obvious virtually. But when I finally got the gist of it, it widened my perspective. And of course, it helps me find better ways to manage each of their expectations and communicate to them about my works as copywriter.
Anyway, in my first two months, we prepared two updates on our app’s search bar and a new flow for user-generated public collection. In that time frame, we’ve also done minor reiterations on our City Guides section and booking form. For a new joiner, it was a lot, and at the start, I came off as more of a listener than a talker. This was because I didn’t want to jump to conclusions too early.
A few days in, I began to pick things up by taking meeting notes for the team to consume. When it comes to catching up with contexts, meeting notes are really handy. I could go through it over and over again, slowly digesting it at my own pace while I familiarize myself with the terms and jargons the design team used.
Later on, though, lots of meetings passed without me ever unmuting my microphone. I found myself listening too much to the point that I could not share my thoughts. For example, when my peers asked me to review their current design, I could not bring myself to suggest anything. My initial thought was that I need to expand my knowledge and reference in User Experience (UX) so I can articulate feedback better.
But there are many more ways to take ownership in a project. For example, to help drive team discussions. This means making sure what we talk about is focused on the project goal of said discussion, we have the feedback we need, and come up with actionable steps at the end to make sure everyone knows what needs to be done. This would not only help the other team members but also improve my confidence to speak up and own it.
Of course, knowing this did not automatically make me a good facilitator. There were times when I had to cover for a peer who was supposed to lead the meeting, and I became so nervous that the flow of the discussion became unclear. But if I did not push myself to try, when else would I learn?
And facilitating is just one among many other tasks I am challenged to do outside my area of expertise. No matter which role one fills, Traveloka will push every person to learn each part of the process — including Tricleloka — and own it from end to end. Embracing the learning process will help us grow our capacity.
Getting to know the people
A few weeks into my probation, I learned that most people in my team have been working at Traveloka for at least a year or more. This means they know each other well while I have never even met them in person. I also noticed that in general, people in Traveloka are reserved. At first, of course this made me a bit nervous.
Being a remote joiner can feel lonely at times. When your bond with your team is established solely through professional channels — Slack, Google Meet, you name it — you want to avoid ‘misusing’ them. As a result, the effort to build more meaningful connection can feel much more deliberate. I had to be more sensitive in learning small details about each person and make room for small talks, when these interactions didn’t just naturally happen in places reserved for work.
That said, I was welcome with warm smiles (behind the screen, of course). This played a part in making my learning experience more enjoyable. My lead and assigned buddy are particularly helpful. In hindsight, a lot of probation-related headaches and anxiety could have been avoided if I had been intentionally transparent earlier to them about my worries. They are always willing to help me prioritize tasks and disentangle my thoughts.
I am also fortunate that my team has been forgiving and patient enough to let me learn while telling me where I need to step up. This is the first time I work in a place where everyone seems to know what they are doing, which means they can easily notice if my work still need fixes and fine-tunings. But they always come up with meaningful feedback and actionable steps on how my work can be improved.
The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know and I have to learn. But I enjoy this because it reinforces the importance of having humility in the workplace and being open to learning new skills, processes, and perspectives. The top of it is that my leads and teammates place a lot of trust in me to execute. They let me do my work on my own and hold me accountable rather than constantly checking up on me.
In Traveloka, people start with trust then see, measure and adjust how much each person can take. The more we prove their trust right, the more we grow. And that’s how learning that once felt uncomfortable becomes extremely rewarding.
Note from Traveloka Design team:
Special thanks to Dhika Aulia (Senior UIDev) for the Tricleloka diagram illustration, to our then-CDC B3 and B4 Designers who took part in the creation of Tricleloka v1 phases (you know who you are!), and to Dara Tasha who coined the name ‘Tricleloka’.
