Want to build great products? Start with a diverse team

How Xendit’s disbursements team grew our product >18X by building the right team

Artwork by Rizky Radian

Background

4 years ago, I started out as a product manager in Xendit’s disbursements team. From my first few meetings with partners and customers, I realised that I was probably not the best person for the job. Back in 2018, we operated mainly in Indonesia. While some of our customers and partners were conversant in English, many of them were most comfortable speaking their native language, Bahasa Indonesia, a language I was unfortunately inept in. In key junctures of meetings with partners, it was our tech lead Ahmad who stepped forward to build rapport, articulate our partnership goals, and negotiate product features in Bahasa Indonesia, more eloquently and effectively than I ever could.

To build great products and experiences, we need to start with great people, great ideas, and great execution. Operating in a hyper-growth company, we don’t just get the opportunity to build the product; we also get to build out the team, culture, and conditions that we think will enable the best products to be built.

In the past four years of growing and leading our disbursements team, I’ve been fortunate enough to witness how intentionally building out a team that is diverse has helped us form better working relationships with our customers and partners, make better decisions, and ultimately, build better products for our customers.

In this blog post, diversity refers to the different characteristics that make each person unique–this can include race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, but can also include a person’s life experiences, skills, opinions, and hobbies — all of which can translate to advantages in the workplace if harnessed well.

The research

My perspective is not new but supported by tons of research — Mckinsey (2019) found that culturally diverse companies were shown to be 36 percent more likely to have better financial returns above the national industry median and that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to have above-average profitability. Research from Gartner found that in a diverse workforce, performance improves by 12%, and people were 20% more likely to stay.

At Xendit, we’ve seen that having diversity in teams is not just generally important, but absolutely business-critical for us on three dimensions.

1. Building deep local understanding

Southeast Asia isn’t the easiest place to build a business. In fact, the World Bank ranks two of our primary markets, Indonesia and Philippines, as a few of the hardest countries to do business in, because of the complex regulatory and cultural landscape. Likewise, the local payments landscapes are extremely fragmented and difficult for businesses to navigate.

While we’ve adopted some of the best parts of typical startup working culture within Xendit, like the speed of execution and experimentation, we’ve found that our strength is having specific team members who gave us the ability to be hyper-local where it matters:

• Understanding the market and local customer preferences: Indonesia and the Philippines are very different from other countries in demography and preferred payment methods. While credit cards may be the preferred payment method in more developed countries, the vast majority of shoppers in Indonesia and the Philippines prefer to pay via alternative payment methods such as bank transfers, e-wallets, and cash — payment options we have built out to help businesses succeed. In a recent customer survey, we heard that the Xendit team’s understanding of the local market, culture, and trends is a key reason why customers prefer us compared to other payment providers.
• Talking to customers in their native language: Our sales and solutions teams have helped not only local businesses succeed by speaking their native language, but also helped numerous foreign businesses from China, Europe, and the USA enter these markets, thanks to the diversity of local context understanding and international language skills of our sales and support teams. Today, our sales and support team members can provide technical support in multiple languages — English, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, and Mandarin, just to name a few.
• Building strong local partnerships: A large part of the invisible work in building payments infrastructure is in working with our partners — regulators, banks and financial institutions — through regulatory, technical, and infrastructural problems to deliver the reliable and scalable payout services that our customers need. On the disbursements team, our devs and PMs are on the front line, talking to the business and technical teams of local partners daily to build payment integrations, work through any issues that arise, and co-build improvements for our merchants.

Therefore, it’s crucial that our product managers, researchers, designers, and engineers are not just technically skilled, but also have deep local knowledge, native language skills, and cultural awareness so that we can put our best foot forward when relating to our customers and partners in each market we operate in.

This doesn’t mean that we hire exclusively locally. Instead, when building out our team, we are mindful in identifying what skill-sets we need to add to our team to make our team more well-rounded, and better equipped to achieve our goals. Skill sets that we value can include native language abilities, or strong expertise in an area we want to go into, such as experience building API integrations with local providers. More than that, we love people who are curious and want to go deep in understanding any market we’re in.

A fun educational side effect of this work scope? Everyone in our team has started to learn and speak basic Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog with our partners and customers regardless of our nationality.

2. Discovering better user insights and ideas

Having people with diverse experiences, backgrounds, skills, and interests means we get to bring different ideas, skill sets, and perspectives to the table to solve for our customers better.

In product, we often think that we should “walk in the user’s shoes” in order to discover their needs and pain points. However, this is often easier said than practically done because as humans, we often fall prey to our own biases and blind spots. In “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, Caroline Criado Perez pointed out how having only a narrow set of perspectives on a design process can result in unintended results. One example: because seatbelts were designed for the average male body, that has fatal implications for women in crashes.

Instead of only walking in our customers’ shoes, I believe it’s even more important to also build a team which represents a cross-section of our customers and end-customers. Our disbursements product is used by businesses across countries and segments of the economy–e-commerce, travel, gaming, live streaming, fintech, etc. The end-users of these businesses are diverse across all dimensions. As a result, I see it as an advantage if our team can be representative of our user base — we are bargain hunters, travel lovers, entrepreneurs, investors, parents, live streamers and gamers. With such varied perspectives, everyone can contribute better ideas on user needs, trends, and opportunities. Often, it is not just our product managers and designers who bring user insights to the table. Some examples:

• Our devs noticed that many of our merchants’ disbursements into bank accounts were actually attempts to top up into e-wallet accounts linked to those bank account numbers. When we realised that payouts to the leading Indonesia e-wallets were increasingly popular, we prioritised direct integrations to the e-wallet partners, then routed such disbursements to those direct e-wallet integrations. The result: better payment performance and richer features for our merchants.
• Our Gen-Z teammates informed us how they, and other users, were using live streaming apps to earn and withdraw credits. This sparked more ideas and discussion on how we may better support the specific needs of our growing pool of merchants in the live-streaming and gaming industries. Specifically, these industries tend to send micro-payment amounts (less than US$1 per transaction), so we devised new pricing models to accommodate these use cases.

Having diverse voices on the team creates a rich environment to discover product opportunities that I would not have thought of myself. These voices shape our design decisions to build more innovative, delightful, and inclusive products.

3. Attracting and retaining great people

Finally, having a diverse team has reaped rewards in our ability to attract and retain talent in a hyper-competitive talent market. This is especially important because our ability to grow our business depends greatly on our ability to attract, hire and retain great people on our team.

Since we started to prioritise diversity and inclusion, we’ve seen the following learnings and improvements in hiring and retention:

• Better employer branding: Diversity makes us significantly more attractive to candidates. Numerous candidates have told me that they want to work in Xendit precisely because they want to join a diverse team. They want to encounter and work with team members from different countries and cultural backgrounds, because they believe this will provide an exciting environment primed for the exchange of ideas, learning, and creativity. The diversity on the disbursements team has become a huge selling point for candidates to prefer us over another company or team that has a more homogenous demographic.
• A fairer and more effective recruiting process. Ever since prioritising diversity, we have become more thoughtful about setting out clear hiring criteria, including thinking about the skill sets, experiences, and background we look for in candidates to strengthen our team. That has resulted in a more targeted hiring process. Also, because we had to start looking outside of typical hiring channels in order to find more diverse candidates, we ended up growing our talent pool, and have been able to get more candidates into our hiring funnel.
• More inclusive work arrangements. We ask for feedback often — throughout the hiring process, during probation, and throughout an employee’s tenure at Xendit via 1-on-1s, to learn how to enable our team members to bring their best selves to work.. We’ve learned more from candid conversations and feedback on what we can do to improve inclusivity in the way we work, be it making our flexible work arrangements more prominent to candidates, to finding ways to restructure our meetings and discussions to invite more perspectives and ideas.
• Better engagement and retention. Research from Deloitte (2013) found that teams focused on diversity and inclusion tend to deliver the highest levels of engagement, engagement here refers to whether the person is likely to stay with their employer, advocate for their employer, and go the extra mile. We’ve observed this to be true — while Founders Circle estimates unicorn startups have an attrition rate as high as 25%, our team’s attrition rate has been maintained at under 10%.

Final notes

When I started at disbursements in 2018, we were a small team of 4. In that time, our team has grown in size to >30 people. The team is represented across 5 nationalities, located across multiple geographies, and 35% female — a gender ratio higher than the average of 25% in big tech companies. We’ve built a suite of payouts products which has expanded to multiple markets and scaled >18X in total payments volume. My Bahasa Indonesia language skills are still rudimentary. Thankfully, our team more than makes up for my shortcomings. :)

We’re far from satisfied as there’s lots more we can do to improve our diversity. That said, it’s encouraging to see some of our efforts show positive results. One of the things I’m most proud of is how we’ve improved gender diversity in the disbursements engineering team, which is incidentally one of the biggest challenges facing the tech industry.

To end, I invite the reader to consider the following questions: how may my team do better with a more diverse set of skills, experiences, and voices?

This writing is the first part of our series on Diversity in Hiring. Follow us to learn more from our engineering manager, Ahmad, on strategies we adopted to improve gender diversity in our engineering team.