"Food for me is more than just a daily habit but something that brings a lot of joy. Food is also at its best when it’s a communal experience. Food brings people together and can create many happy moments."

Lately, GO-FOOD has been busy innovating and working on many new features. Not only the new category UI make it easier to find what kind of food we want to order, but also the social discovery platform that just launched several days ago helps us discover our friends’ recommendations.

In this special edition, I’m glad that I can talk to the one and only Female Product Owner in GO-JEK, Yeti Khim. After quitting from Dropbox, Yeti joined GO-JEK since February 2016. After a year at GO-JEK, there are a lot of lessons that she has learned.

With her very unique and kind personality, she explains her perception of food, why she always prioritize her teams Index of Happiness, and how GO-FOOD is evolving into a social discovery platform.

Where is GO-FOOD now and where do you want to take it since you’ve joined at the start of the year?

GO-FOOD last year was about becoming the number one online food delivery platform, this year, our big focus is evolving beyond just an online food delivery platform to becoming a food discovery platform. So, that’s kind of how we are changing from ordering to discovery. We realized that one big thing that everyone was doing when it comes to food was looking for recommendations. People don’t want to just see what is the content and what’s available but also tend to get a recommendation from friends what’s best to eat, what’s the recommendation, something like that.

So, when we asked people where they get most of their recommendation that said they usually get from a trusted group of friends. It’s always like that when you’re sitting down, you ask your friends what’s good, you check out each other’s Instagram stories, etc. So we decided to allow users to do discover and share their favorite dishes with their friends. That’s what GO-FOOD is social recommendations about.

Since you’ve joined, what have you changed about the GO-FOOD App?

The first thing that I ask my team is to make GO-FOOD experience more delightful. To me, food is and has the potential to provide so much joy in our day-to-day. It’s one of the highlights of my day to order food to share food with each other, like every day we share snap chat of our food, and when there are food people always come together, and these gathering around food creates many memorable moments.

So I thought, how can we put this joy and delight into the app experience. A lot of new design that we’re doing is meant to do just that. We are adding in a lot of small animations for example.

Animations probably is just a small detail, but at GO-JEK, we’re often spending most of our time building out the next big feature that we’re not able to spend time tweaking the small details that don’t necessary drive more orders but add some emotional element. That’s been one thing that I’ve been pushing my team and myself to do.

Where the ideas of every new feature in GO-FOOD come from?

One thing that I like in GO-JEK, the ideas can come from anywhere and everywhere. So obviously, much suggestions come from Nadiem, but all features in GO-FOOD now comes from anywhere like from users, things we see in data, things we got from studies, see the competitive landscape, feedback we receive from a merchant, and also from other GO-JEK employees and team members.

How long the process to develop a feature take?

It depends on the complexity of the feature. Some of the things we do, we are doing some quick wins, small fix to make an experience better. Like there’s small features that take less than a week, but then there’s some other big-bet features like social recommendations took 2 to 3 months since the first-time ideation, designing, iteration, developing, and then doing testing users, market research, finalization. And after that, we will keep iterating on this for the next couple months.  

Can you tell us what’s the difference of culture between Dropbox and GO-JEK?

What’s different is the pace. GO-JEK is a do fast, fail fast, and learn fast environment. It’s important for you to keep innovating, keep moving, keep trying, and to not be afraid to make mistakes. And maybe that’s something that is very different from when I was at Dropbox. One of Dropbox’s key principle was “Sweat the details” about tweaking every little detail until you achieved something near perfection. This created a much slower, cautious working environment.

But GO-JEK is the exact opposite. One of our key values is speed. It’s important to move fast. And what I’ve discovered is that I really enjoy this fast pace. I can learn much quicker, it’s much more dynamic, and it makes me much more excited every day coming to work. You are constantly being pushed to do more, to go even faster, but you are also given the room to make mistakes. That creates a very adventurous, dynamic, and challenging environment, which I’ve been loving. It’s a very exciting place to learn, grow, and make an impact.