Episode 11: Leading Design from New York to Singapore with Randy Hunt, Head of Design at Grab
01:06:28 Share

Hi everyone, I'm Dalen, founder and design educator at Curious Core.

Welcome to our Working in UX Design podcast series where we interview a UX design leader in the industry on their experience in this emerging field. We've had UX professionals from Grab, AirAsia, Google and more join us previously and we're bringing you more exciting interviews this year. Stay tuned for this week's interview with our special guest who is working in UX design.

Alright, good evening everyone. This is Dalon over here from Curious Core and welcome to another session of working in UX design. And I am excited to have our guest today, Randy Han from Grab. He's the head of design of Grab and is an American design-centered executive living in Singapore where he spearheads a team of more than 130 product designers, researchers, writers and illustrators.

trying to create the best experience of Southeast Asia's leading family of super apps as we all know Grab and he has over 15 years of experience in the design industry. He was previously the head of design for Artsy and VP of design at Etsy and he also authored the product design for the web book which

which explores the evolving discipline of product design for today's connected world. So feel free to find that on your favorite bookstore. He's also an active writer, lecturer, critic, and visiting designer at education institutions, including ours.

and he feels most joy when creating things and learning along the way. And I've come to know Randy as someone who is a big proponent of community building. So we're going to spend some time talking about that today as well. And he will be sharing with us

this evening on his perspective on design leadership in the US versus Southeast Asia. So let's all give ourselves a virtual applause for Randy and welcome Randy to the show. Hi there. Hello.

Hi, nice to see everyone. So Randy, I think let's all start with the beginning. What attracted you to relocate to Singapore and join Grab several years ago? Yeah, sure. Like a lot of large, big changes like this, there's sort of a number of factors. Personal factor, professional factors.

I've been working for, I think like you said, probably in design longer than 15 years, maybe 20 plus years. But working on multi-sided marketplaces in sort of a tech context since 2006 or so. That means that I have a lot of experience in that space. I've kind of seen it through different generations of internet and mobile apps.

So I can lean on that experience. I was looking to do that in what I did next. I was like, okay, how do I leverage my learnings and understandings and apply them in a different context? So that was one. I continued to build this multi-sided marketplace experience, apply what I've learned from the past. The other is I was really looking for products and businesses that were serving mass audiences. Essentially everything I've done before has been

niches and niches that turned into really big niches, but they still were not mass products. This very like designer-y marketplace I worked on, Etsy, which has gotten quite large, but it's still not an everyone product or brand. And I worked in contemporary art sales online, which is a much, much smaller audience, high value transactions, a very different kind of thing.

you know, those are all fun and interesting experiences. And for a lot of designers, you might hear me describe each of those things and say, wow, that's cool. But for me, I was interested in working on something that felt like a primary value of the product or the service offering was something that could be experienced by almost anyone, you know, something that felt more like infrastructure or plumbing, you know? And so I was sort of had my eyes opened.

and ears open for opportunities that might match that. So that's how I was kind of looking out into the world. And then actually Grab found me. It was serendipitous timing. And when I came to learn about the organization one, I got very excited about a sense of

purpose and its mission. I was also excited by its scale at the time. Like it had grown very large, very quickly, which is from my past experience, I did some pattern matching and know that that's a fun and exciting context to work in for me, but I also felt comfortable with it, not scared by it, you know?

And then as I also learned more, I was kind of generally aware of sort of macro conditions. But as I learned more about the macro conditions, one shifts in the global economy in general, but also what is happening in Southeast Asia and what is likely to happen in Southeast Asia over the coming years.

That became really exciting to me as well because it looked like a context in which there's massive growth in the future. Yeah, so we sort of see it happening now, but it's largely informed by, you know, a young generation

largely young population, you know, a very large, mostly young population, many, many people across the region sort of experiencing a connected internet enabled experience for the first time on mobile devices in the context of the kinds of products and services that Grab was offering. And I said, wow, that is like incredible. What a cool and interesting context. And also, it felt like a massive learning experience, right? So I've got all these relevant experiences from my past.

But I've also never worked for a company that wasn't a Western company, that didn't start in the States. I've worked on many globalization and internationalization projects in the organizations I've been a part of. But that is different than working with a team and an organization for customers that are very much rooted in a different place. And to me, that was in some ways more of an exciting life experience.

in addition to a professional experience. I said, "I think I will grow and be stretched and learn from this opportunity." So a good match of known and unknown. So has it been what you expected so far after being here since 2019? Oh gosh, I guess the headline is "No." And I don't mean "No" in a bad way. I mean that on one hand, I didn't really have expectations. I've kind of learned to not have specific expectations when coming into something and kind of being open to what reveals itself.

But the other is, of course, the shared experience we're all having from spring 2020 onward. Who would have predicted that this would be like the experience we'd all have? And it's changed our professional experience and our personal experience of things. And that's been wild, you know, and there's parts of it where I feel very thankful to be in Singapore in particular.

There's times where I feel very frustrated to be in Singapore in particular. There's times where I feel a great sense of like responsibility and sort of the gravity of the role that the organization plays, like in the region, especially outside of Singapore, where our customers, our driver partners, our merchants, whose economic livelihood is very important to us, have struggled because of the pandemic, you know, and that feels...

It's really meaningful and really impactful. That's not necessarily easy. In fact, it's quite hard and can be emotionally taxing, but the work is important, and that's exciting.

Makes you feel good about the effort you're putting in every day. That's wonderful. And thank you for being here and thank you for sharing your experiences. And just wanted to know, what were some of the key challenges initially when you first come to Southeast Asia and Singapore to grow Grab from what it is back in 2019, pre-COVID, pre-pandemic? What were some of the challenges? And we'll talk a little bit about the COVID challenge later. Yeah, sure, sure.

So I think there's personal challenges and feel free to ask follow-ups to dig in or something. But I think the personal challenges were largely about the unknown, like we talked about. That is everything from the broader cultural context, maybe the specific Singapore cultural context and kind of what is business and professional life like in Singapore, then the company culture, and then you have the existing team and partners. Because it's very different to sort of step into a team that exists than it is to sort of build a team from the ground up.

In the situation of stepping into a team, I think maybe the team that grabbed the design organization was maybe 70 or so people when I joined. So we've maybe doubled it roughly. It's about 145 or so today. And a team that exists has a whole shared history together, all sorts of established patterns and habits, right?

Things that work and don't work, things that people think work, but actually don't work, things that don't work, but are, you know, people think that don't work, but are actually okay. And all of the like battle scars from, you know, challenges in the past, but also all the bonding and shared experiences of having like achieved things together. And so as someone who steps in to that, you're, you're,

you don't have all of that at all. It's all unknown to you. And as much as other team members and other people try to be helpful in onboarding you to those things and helping you give their lens into it, in some ways you can never actually have that experience because you weren't there for it. So you have to both kind of

and recognize the teams is what it is because of this group of people and other people that have come before, you know, and try to find the strengths within there, in particular, the strength that you need to leverage for the next chapter of growth, you know, and then try to sort of design the experience for everyone looking forward. You know, it's kind of like the,

If you think about a sports team metaphor or something, you kind of have seasons of play. And between one season and the next, you might have many of the same players playing.

but not all of the same players. And you might think about what the training regimen for the team looks like and what plays are important now. And there's changes in the league. Other people have different strengths for different reasons. Maybe you've graduated to a more advanced league, and so you have to up your playing and things like that. So it's interesting kind of continuity and newness that is

Both challenging and exciting, you know, I think as a personal level, and I'm sure it is for the team as well. Oh, yeah. So what I'm hearing you say is that you had to quickly sort of build trust and bond with the team, especially when they were bonded through fire, building Gramp out to what it is, and that you had to also like take them to the next level. So how did you exactly do that? Do you have like some practical tips and advice for some of the design leaders here listening?

Yeah, sure. I mean, happy to share. I think what is, you know, to preempt what I share, I think there's no kind of magic in it. It's essentially, well, in fact, I love this. I love this idea that, you know, magic in the sense of it's not like sorcery, but kind of like magic tricks or something, right? Anything will appear magic if the amount of effort it takes to do it appears unrealistic to anyone else. Like, how did you possibly do this?

actually you just do it. That's what it's like crazy. You know, you actually practice a whole lot. That's how you get a magic trick to be good. Right. And so similarly, I think that,

One of the things I did very early in my time at Grab was just a massive amount of one-on-one conversations with everyone in the team. Like every single team member, any tenure, level of seniority, part of the company they worked on. And in fact, kept it going. So I ended up doing, just on the design team alone, I think we did like 100 or so of these because we were also growing the team very quickly.

So I got some support to help schedule these in quick succession, you know, but also, you know, as a leader in the organization, you're not only doing that with the design team. Yeah. You know, of course you need to meet and understand the members of, you know, in this case, the design function design team, but it is, you know, in a way my closer collaborators have

And we have to establish deep trust and partnership, you know, to get the good work done is actually very much outside of design. So I'm meeting with, you know, product and engineering leaders, our analytics leaders, the business owners for different verticals, our country heads, you know, and the, it sounds so basic, you know, it's so simple. Like, Oh, you meet people and talk with them. And of course I have some structure to those, you know, um,

but it was like the a version of diving in, you know, like kind of jump into the deep end, but starting first with people and just trying to gain context. You know, I intentionally decided to not make decisions and,

And I let people know that upfront. You may be expecting me to change some things right away. You have pain points or you have hopes for someone in this position. I was like, I want to hear those, but I'm not going to change anything right now, actually. Like I'm just a sponge, you know? And please don't expect there to be like radical impact 30 days later. I'm going to listen. Then I'm going to develop a plan. Then I'm going to communicate the plan to you. Then you'll start to see some differences.

And what I think is interesting there, even in that, that in of itself is actually a little bit of a difference from like a leadership standpoint to say, I'm going to take a patient approach and I'm going to set your expectations and I'm not going to ask you to change or do anything right this minute. You know? So even like behaviorally, I'm already signaling and showing that it is different or showing that like my style or approach, but it actually is all information gathering, um,

And then I would organize and process that information. So I kind of have a method to my madness where I take notes and tag them with the thing. So this way I can shovel that information and slice and dice it later and understand, okay, what were the concerns or challenges people had? What was the work that people were most proud of? Where did they see opportunities to improve? Because you learn a lot when you hear it from a designer who just started, designer who's been there for six years, a product management partner. You start to triangulate these things and can see where their shared perspective is.

and also where there's very much differences in the perspectives of those things. Yeah, and I think at that point in time, back in 2019, Grab was still pretty much just in Southeast Asia and maybe the ambition was still not global yet and you were there, you're trying to take the team to the next level. What were some of the things you prioritized in order to

to help this team grow and take it to the next level? Because at that point in time, I also noticed that there are other design leaders in the organization, some like Jay, who's on our curriculum advisory board is from the US as well. So yeah, what did you have to do at that point in time? I mean, I think one was simply build the team. And by that, I mean,

add people to the team, like strengthen the team by adding more human being power. And I shouldn't say simply actually, but to grow the team, which means a few bringing new people onto the team. There's also ensuring that the people we're bringing onto the team match the future needs of the team. This was an important switch, I think, not only for design, but other parts of the organization as well. Grab had grown so fast. I mean, it was growing so fast for so long. It was often...

Trying to catch up with itself in a way. And so trying not to solve today's problem that was really kind of like yesterday's problem, you know, it's like chasing you quickly. But instead, look ahead a bit and say, what do we need for our future state? Because actually, that state will be here in six months or nine months. I've lived through that experience before. And so to your point,

bringing in some other also very experienced design leaders to join the organization as well. You know, it's like almost from day one, it's like, okay, I need to build a roadmap to how I'm enabling more leadership in the team and I'm not responsible for, you know, as much of this directly because it's too big and it's moving too fast, you know? So from my view, it's kind of like, how do we create a sustainable machine in a way of like good quality, like leadership and development shipping product, you know,

that for the most part can operate itself, right? So that means getting the right people in place. And we also, you know, sort of evolved the responsibilities and areas of focus of different members of the team. You know, some people had kind of inherited three or four teams out of necessity. We're growing so fast here. Can you be responsible for this? Can you be responsible for this? And in some cases, it was just too much for them. They were like, hey, cool, first time manager. Great. Three months later, you're like, hey, take on these three other teams.

And it's a practical choice at the time, but in that environment, no one has the opportunity to really practice developing their management and leadership skills. You know, everyone kind of gets underserved unintentionally. You know, the intentions are all good, but the reality is that those conditions are sort of suboptimal. And so that also means bringing in more people so you can divide responsibilities, being clear about the job definitions and the role sculpting so that people understand where their responsibilities are. And then, yeah,

You sort of match that to how we both who we seek out externally, like what the characteristics of external candidates are, and then how we evaluate and interview them as well. So really kind of upgrading this kind of role definition, talent assessment, interviewing, et cetera, is really critical early on because you're going to do a lot of it. So you fix that problem as early as possible. So then additional team members or changes in your organization benefit from that later.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned about scaling leadership in this context and finding good leaders, helping leaders who are already in the organization to kind of manage their time a little bit better or manage the teams a little bit better because of the uneven distribution. In retrospect, would you do anything differently now looking back now it's 2021

Would you have done anything different in 2019? Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, probably many things, you know, hindsight is 2020 for sure. I mean, I think that's something that always feels like it wish you would do sooner. Like I think you can never do too early. And so while we did some of it, I wish we had done more sooner. It's actually around explicit management and leadership training. And I don't mean, you know, like a workshop or a session, right? I mean like an ongoing healthy management development. Yeah.

Because it too is a craft and a practice. And it's something you can critique in a way, you know, and develop and learn. And of course, this can happen in one-on-one settings, you know, in a typical corporate environment. You know, you have a one-on-one meeting with your manager or something, but you can learn as much from your peers and partners, both in your similar role or function, other design managers and things, but also people with

similar responsibilities and other functions around the company. In fact, sometimes maybe you learn more from their perspective. And early, we did some of these things in a structured way, and then they became more ad hoc. I think we really didn't build a program around that as much as in hindsight, I think we could have. But of course, you sort of learn from that and you evolve moving forward. But I think in a way, that's something that is just very important to invest in, in general. It's often...

can be hard for an organization to, I mean, easy to recognize that if I were to say this to anyone in an organization, they would say, yes, that's a good idea, but dot, dot, dot actually acting on it or making the decision can be hard because it's, it takes time. Sometimes it takes other resources too, but mostly it's time, you know, human being effort.

to plan and operate and do this. But the other thing is it takes time to see the results, right? So it requires a level of patience to do well, you know? So it's not a program where you say like, you know, what's my ROI this quarter on it?

you kind of have to believe that it is important. And you can measure the importance of this over time through things like attrition rate, team happiness with their manager, a bunch of other constructed kind of qualitative turned quantitative assessment.

but they're trailing indicators, right? They come much later. Yeah. Such as when you say trailing indicators. I mean things like, let's say you look at attrition as an example, as like a sort of a negative indicator. You might look at something like the velocity of sort of promotion or skills development, not just promotion as an example, but you might say we have a criteria of skills development and we see people moving through it at a faster velocity or a particular velocity.

But it literally takes time to do those things. And so you can't understand if at scale you're making progress against it until maybe three or six months have passed.

When you look at maybe attrition as a trailing indicator, which is not, I mean, it's helpful to know, but by the time you're looking at the data that says maybe, oh, there's a challenge in this part of the team, you can't magically fix it. So it's good to know you have some work to do, but that signal is about you six months ago, not you today. Yeah.

So it's important to try to get at more like smaller, more frequent signals to help you shape things like that. Yeah, that's excellent. And thanks for sharing that. I've been doing a bit of research on Grab. It's just by nature, observing and listening to some of the stories, talking to some of your team members and staff members.

I understand that you organize your teams around specialization. So you have design operations, you have design teams, and you also organize them around the different apps, right? Where you have transport, you have delivery, you have food, you have safety and stuff. I also hear that

For designers in particular, there are two different tracks, like one being a team manager where they're managing people and another being on an individual contributor track where they're specializing in a very deep into their craft. Do you want to comment a little bit about like your thoughts behind structuring the teams this way? Yeah, sure. We'll talk about maybe the roles and like paths for designers.

in a moment. But overall, the team structure, I actually think that what I'll, I mean, I'll happy to share in more details, but I don't think it's particularly unique. I think there are a few common ways that technology centric companies doing software product development that also intersects with, you know, some other things like communications and marketing organized. There's probably two or three formats. The format of how we do it at Grab is one of those. It's very similar actually to the high level organization I've

of teams I've built in the past, other teams I've advised or observed. So there's nothing radical about what I'm about to share. And actually within the design organization, there's a couple of different organizational models kind of happening at the same time. Again, not that novel. This is pretty common of any team of a certain size. So there's a set of organizational units that are really about different products or services that we offer to our customers.

And that organization is not unique to design. It's kind of matched with product engineering, analytics, etc. So these are teams that are multidisciplinary, cross-functional teams that are similarly report up to their functions, right? So the product managers kind of report up through a product organization and the engineers through engineering organization.

but they are grouped together and our design managers manage them. The designers focus in logical chunks. We have what we would call our delivery is business. That's doing, you know, food delivery and our express kind of A to B like kind of courier service experience. We have transportation, which is giving like rides, you know, from A to B. We have some like financial services. We have our core, you know, payments experience. We have our geo and mapping experience. And so some of these, you might already tell, you know, I say like core payments or mapping experiences,

or something like our customer support experience. These actually serve customers in all of our product areas, you know? And then there's some that are more vertical, food, transportation, GrabPay wallet, et cetera, insurance, lending, et cetera. So again, all of these are common organizational groups across functions, design inclusive.

Then there are a number of other functions. Actually, let me back up. The designers in those groups report into design managers who are responsible for those areas. You might say there's a design manager on transportation and there's designers who report into them who are focused on transportation. And so a design manager as a partner appears in engineering, product, et cetera, who are sort of the core leadership team across that group.

Then we have other functions that, again, pretty common in different organizations where the scale of these other functions, like the number of people involved in them, but also the extent to which their work is needed in any one of these areas at a high sustained volume kind of varies. So we have like an illustration practice. We have our content design team. We have our research team.

They are grouped functionally, but not embedded inside those teams by design. This is intentional. But in their day-to-day work, they may be closer or further from any one of those teams given the needs at the time. So you might imagine we're doing some new product development or even some new problem discovery. The researchers who work with this team may get very, very close and almost feel like they're embedded in the teams. They're attending all of the meetings. They're helping shape the team.

deciding what to focus on working really closely with product and things. And then they might back off from that team at some point and put their time and attention into a different team. So it kind of ebbs and flows where the designers in that team are involved throughout the process because our product design contribution is really from the very beginning of like problem definition.

down through QA after the technology build, and then working with the team to understand the success of what we built. Analyzing and understanding any particular project once it's out in customer sense. Product designers are organized vertically and working along the long arc of the product.

The other functions are kind of organized vertically and working in sort of the ebb and flow of the product. What often happens in organizations, you get to a reasonable scale of some of these things. So say you're a research team or something, you might have enough researchers that you start to embed them more in teams. It's like the next inflection point. You might even have communication designer teams.

focused in a part of the team because actually there's a ton of marketing related work that ends up being regularly a part of that area. So that's how we're organized inside design and it's not designed for design alone. It's really about how it fits in with the other pieces of the puzzle.

Yeah, and in terms of progression, because you said something earlier about training or scaling leadership within the organization, right? Something that you would have done more if given the opportunity to do it again, right?

So some designers are good at managing people. Some designers are not so good at managing people. So I understand that's actually maybe two potential career paths at Grab. Would that be accurate? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this idea of sort of a management track and an IC track, individual contributor track, is something I was first exposed to probably in 2010 or something like that.

But when I was learning about it, I came to learn that this has been long established. If you go back to many organizations, it's not like a new concept. And so what's kind of fascinating to me is how it seems like many organizations have to relearn this lesson, even though it's sort of well-established out in the world. Now, I do think there are cultural differences that come into play. And I think we see that summit grab, although...

My perspective is, you know, I'm coming from just a very different context and I'll speak to those cultural differences in a second. But largely you have fewer managers in a team than non-managers. I mean, it would be insane if the opposite were the case. That is logical. And so if you just take this constraint approach,

And then kind of imagine its logical outcome. You know, if you only have one path of progression, which says, do you sort of, you get more skilled, you get more senior, maybe you get promoted, you have all these things. And then at some point you start doing this other different job, which is like coaching people, working on career development, kind of process and operations planning. Not that all these things are always parts of management, but often this cluster together, you know, cross-functional alignment, communication, blah, blah, blah. All of these things that aren't the

Honestly, they are not the main value contributors, right? The value contribution for the customers is mostly in doing the work itself, like actually executing on the work. Strategy is great and all, and it is important, valuable, but a strategy un-executed on does not matter to your customers and does not matter to your business. And so the risk, in a way, of an environment where you don't have two paths

is a thing that I believe is called the Peter principle. Essentially, you will get promoted to your level of incompetence. It sort of implies that you will keep growing and growing and growing, and then your job will change, and you will suddenly be very bad at your job. And this is a common challenge you see. I mean, I say this in a safe space. I don't mean like, oh, you're bad at your job. It becomes a real struggle or a challenge.

It's not to say that this happens to everyone. In fact, many of these skills are skills you can learn and practice. It is a, you know, managing, like I said, is a craft itself, you know, and you can treat it that way and learn, develop, grow. But it's a very different kind of work. It takes a different kind of energy in a way, you know, and maybe is better suited to particular personalities or motivations or ways of showing up in your work.

And so it's very risky to have only this one way of growing because it's not actually compatible for everyone. Not everyone either is good or wants to be good at it, like the actual work. Often what I see is people want what they perceive as the status or the power. And I don't mean in some major power play way, but I mean like, oh, if only I was the manager, then this thing would be better.

Or I could make the decisions or I'd be a part of the strategy. And I think once you're in that position, you very quickly learn that that's wrong. You know, you're often, you know, you are a, you are a orchestrator, but actually you don't have now the ability nor the time to get the real valuable work done. You must kind of work at these meta levels, which is really hard, different skillset, but also for some people can be very unsatisfying work. And that's where this interesting tension comes in. It's like, Oh, I loved this thing.

and now I've advanced so much that I don't get to do the thing I love, which also, reminder, is really the most valuable thing for the organization. Hence the two tracks, so that you can grow as an individual contributor, a person becoming deeper and more experienced in both the craft itself, but also how to deliver the value of the craft in the organization. You solve more complex problems, you lead by example,

You can mentor others by sharing your knowledge and experience without being explicitly responsible for like, you know, defining people's goals and measuring them against those goals and all these kinds of operational things that are important for management, but are not the main work, you know, that you can do those things and become more influential in an organization, grow your own career, develop skills. In fact, this I would say is the very senior individual contributors are probably the most rare in the like design talent crunch today.

Then it's like experienced managers. That's probably number two. And the reason why it's where is not a lot of organizations get this right. It's difficult to do and to support it. They often have this tendency to want to take the really influential, skilled people. Maybe they've been around for a long time and put them into this management role. And it's like leadership and management are smashed together. It's actually like management is sort of practice and leadership is like a way of behaving. And you can be a leader without having a bunch of people reporting into you.

The other important construct though, and I think this is in the organizations that do this very well, that these two tracks has to do a sort of incentives and the framing of things, which is that, you know, in common in any organization, you'll have like sort of job levels and things like compensation, you know, will sort of be matched to those paired with those levels, right? Levels increase the salary ranges for a person filling that role increase.

And the important thing is to match those things between your individual contributors and your managers. Meaning if you're like a level four manager or a level four individual contributor, you're

you essentially are compensated within the same criteria. Because what this does is it switches the incentive. Like I think some organizations get this wrong and it's like, oh, if at some point I want to advance in my compensation, I've been in the industry longer, but maybe also at this point I'm a bit older, maybe I'm building a family or I'm taking care of my parents. I've got, I'm at a different stage of my life and I'm building my life and things like earning a stronger paycheck becomes meaningful and important to you. You may be forced into this management track

because that's how you make more money. But actually, you don't want or need to do the things that are in the management track. It's just the only way to satisfy that very real thing in your hierarchy of needs in your life. So it's important that you can progress through both of these paths and similar opportunities for compensation growth and advancement and influence in the organization. The other important thing is that a change from being an individual contributor to being a manager is not a promotion. It's a lateral move.

So you change roles from being a designer to a design manager. You don't move up to being a design manager. Yeah. And so that's very important as well. These two things kind of turn on their head some of the default assumptions, but they line the incentives the right way. Like you are not going to make more money and it's not a promotion to become a manager. So why should you do it? Oh, because you want to do that work because you believe like that way of working, like the responsibilities of that job are

is something you would like to take on. You'd like to grow and learn those things, and you'd like to contribute to the organization by doing that kind of work. So I think that's super important. The other is that these things are fungible, meaning you could go back and forth. Again, very hard for organizations to do, especially when they get big or moving fast, because it's kind of complicated. It's a lot of context. You got to define this for people and help them be comfortable with it, because there's all this historical stuff that says, oh, you used to be a manager, and now you're not. Oh,

what are you not good at being a manager or did you get demoted? It's like, no, I decided to do different work. That's also really valuable for the company. Like this is great, but you really have to overcome a lot of like assumptions inside an organization that kind of operate this way and say, both these things are valuable in different ways. We need most people doing one of these things and we need fewer people doing this other one and they are different. I think that's such a,

wonderful distinction that you've put out there. And I think it's great that Grab practices it, recognizing individual contributors and recognizing senior individual contributors are as important as design managers. What I've noticed in the design UX design industry over here is that it's a very linear progression, right? You're a designer.

then you're a senior designer and then you're a design manager. Like there's no other path where you could be an individual contributor. So I was just wondering, you mentioned something about

context. You mentioned something about context that's specific to this region or to the Singapore culture. And I think that's especially true growing up in Singapore, where the example you just mentioned, like someone being a manager and then suddenly they're not a manager after all, it's like losing face, right? So I was just wondering, what are some of the other contexts you have to deal with as part of your role as a design leader in Graeme?

I mean, another one that comes to mind is very early in my time at Grab, but essentially someone shared with me that they were wanting to be promoted, you know, and I was kind of talking through like, why is that? Like, what is motivating this? You know, they had kind of brought this to me as something they wanted to talk through with like the leader of the department. And in my context in the West, like in all the years I'd worked in the States, no one had ever said something like this to me. And I appreciated it because it was so straightforward, but it was just new and different. They said, if I get promoted, I can tell my parents and they'll be proud of me.

And I was like, oh, that, I mean, that makes sense, actually. You know, like I, yes, I follow that logic. This is like, I can understand that that would be motivating to someone, but it's very different. And in fact, you know, you have to kind of honor and respect that that is true for someone, but also like that doesn't,

What your parents think doesn't matter to our customers or something. So it's an interesting kind of balancing act in a way or to try to understand that context. Of course, there's likely other motivations and reasons as well. But it's quite interesting that the top of mind thing had to do with familial expectations and either a sense of pride or responsibility or something of following others.

through on those, you know, or meeting those expectations. And for me, it's very different, you know, context. I think a beautiful thing about being here in Asia and something I just don't experience in the West so much is multi-generational living. It's largely absent from American culture and seeing it sort of up close in person. And I'm sure people who have grown up in that context of reasons, they, you know, don't like it or whatever, but the

to observe it. I think it's actually kind of quite beautiful culturally, or it feels like a real compliment to some of the challenges that, you know, I see in the West, but then it also, it also means that maybe your family plays a different role in your own desires or motivations or needs than I'm used to. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. You also, um,

employer grab as an employer that hires very diversely right and I mean diverse in all sense of the word from all countries all types of nationalities all types of different people right regardless of where they're coming from so do you want to kind of comment a little bit on that how how is that sort of like aligned with the way you hire at grab yeah it's interesting I'd say unlike some past experiences I had where I

organizations kind of had to work extremely hard, I think, to pursue cultural diversity or diversity along a number of like sort of vectors. What I found at Grav, and this was true when I came in, is that I suppose maybe some of the habits or norms built into the organization for a long time, but also the context in which the organization comes from,

is more diverse, maybe. Like the starting place is just kind of diverse. So across many, many vectors, it sort of already is. Nationality, ethnicity, faith, you know, but it just is. It's like wildly diverse. And I think that that is something that organization is very proud of and wants to sort of protect and we treat as important, but it doesn't

It's not a particular sort of like corporate mandate or something like I've experienced in the West. It actually, I think, occurs more naturally because of probably the leaders who set the example and have established sort of patterns inside the organization. And then the context they're working in. Context being a very diverse place to begin with. Also a talent crunch where it's like you need to pull people from around the world, you know, but also Singapore as a place to be headquartered is large.

largely friendly to that. Last 18 months, different because of COVID, more challenging, but overall is very accommodating for that in a sector like technology and things. And so it just ends up being a very, very diverse pool. The other thing then is it's important from a leadership standpoint that we

regularly check in on a number of ways of kind of slicing and understanding the data behind our teams to ensure that, you know, the choices we are making aren't reflective of any sort of implicit bias we may not be aware of or other things like that. So as we go through, you know, performance reviews, rounds of promotions, compensation changes, et cetera, we never start from a place of trying to make it even by some diversity criteria.

We base things on other performance, but then we'll always take view and kind of gut check ourselves and say, hey, okay, let's look at this data and what is it saying about the choices we've made? Is it reflective of the

of our team across a bunch of vectors. So we use that as like a gut check to make sure that we're behaving the way we want to. Yeah, I think that's really excellent. And there was a research study and report that mentioned women tend to be a little bit more shy in terms of asking for promotion and in terms of trying to aggressively try and get themselves up the career ladder. Is there anything that your organization does in order to ensure that there's fairness in getting people

women design leaders promote it as long as the performance justifies for it. I mean, essentially, it's like what I just talked about, right? There's sort of these gut check areas, but the other is making sure that things like what you just described, we have training for our managers and leaders and everyone to help us understand

Things like what you just described. So we have an appreciation for some of the historical challenges. So you become aware of various biases that you or others may have. So then you know to look for them. So it's like training around this, understanding the vocabulary, treating it as important to consider these things. The other though is like also a support system and networks. There's like awesome internal like mentorship programs, you know, both female leaders, right?

mentoring other female leaders in this case, but also more broadly, like mentorship programs to say, connect anyone in the organization with other leaders, other people of different sort of profiles and different teams or functions. And those become great relationships for exactly some of the things you're talking about, like both the encouraging of orienting to situations like you're describing differently,

but also kind of, you know, the role playing, the coaching, the kind of more tactical aspects of it as well to help people be successful inside a large organization. Thank you.

Excellent. Well, I love that we went so deep on that front and I wanted to know how has COVID affected the way you are leading your team right now? Because I understand there's a lot of restrictions, especially in Singapore, about working in the office. Previously, it was like 50% of the workforce can only be there at any point in time.

And now it's like work from home is the default. How are you managing this as a leader or how are you getting your leaders to be effective managing their people, especially your team members working from home? Yeah. Ongoing, you know, challenges and experiments. I think like one of the hardest aspects of this, well, one, there's the change, but I think we've gotten to the point where it just feels like constant change. You're like, I don't know what the rules are going to be. It's going to be different. You know, I think for,

Practically speaking, most people have just accepted that it will be working from home indefinitely until it's not, you know, rather than a bunch of in between kind of stuff for themselves and managing their day. They largely have been following the same patterns, even though the rules are different.

The other, though, is the challenge of, I mean, there's a number of challenges with how we feel connected to people or not, how it feels exhausted talking over Zoom. I won't go into these details, right? I think we've all experienced this or read it, you know. But I think one of the things that I've realized that is important to recognize is the

wide range of experiences that different individuals have for various reasons. You know, they're functions of your personality, they're functions of your physical environment, they're functions of other stuff happening in your life. And for one person, they're like, please, let's work from home forever. Right? This is great. Like I get to focus, I'm not interrupted by people, I play my music, whatever in my bedroom while I'm working, it's perfect.

And someone else is like, no, I need to be around other people to feel energized. Like I feel a lack of human connection. It makes me sad or disappointed. And that person, their manager has some different work to do to overcome that. And you have maybe another person who's like, I really need to go back to the office because actually working at home is just distracting. Like my family is here or my kids are here. Like the old way felt better to me because I could compartmentalize myself better and

Those are just three examples of many, but they're so different. Like what each person needs or desires is pretty radically different, you know? And so I think one of the things we've done is just try to be very aware of individual needs and both model this behavior ourselves, but encourage other people to also, you know, it used to be like, Hey, cameras on everybody, because, you know, you get like cues, you know, you can read body language and expression. That's really helpful. But,

And I think we moved to this point. You said, you know what, if you want your camera on, turn your camera off. If you want your camera off, turn your camera off. It doesn't matter. You know, that's a small example, but lots of just being accommodating and really trying to understand even at a team level level.

"Hey team, how would you like this thing to go? What works for you?" And that may be different than an adjacent team that you would expect to behave similarly, but actually their preferences are just different as a group. And that's totally okay. What's more important is that we get the work done. So we've become very flexible with a lot of other things.

Wonderful. And I think one of the things I wanted to ask you, which is one of the reasons we got connected was from a community you were building. We'll talk a little bit about that in just a bit. But you were talking to me about the talent crunch over here in Singapore particularly, but I also believe it's a larger problem in Southeast Asia, hiring qualified user experience design talent. How have you sort of tried to overcome that or

or any approaches that have worked for you so far? Yeah, goodness. They're the mix, I think. I think that talent crunch is actually global. It takes different flavors, different places. To your point, particularly in Singapore right now, largely because of border restrictions and the relationship those have had to employment paths, approvals and entry for foreigners and things, because that's put an even tighter constraint.

on the talent pool currently compared to the past. You know, it's just more flow like in and out. I also think that COVID has created a bit of a flow out for some people because they would need to, you know, either want or need to go back to family or somewhere else. Understandable reasons, but that makes it particularly acute. But other than that, the dynamic around sort of UX and design talent

is very similar like around the world. And I suppose the other challenge regionally is that there are not as many people with as much lived experience, I guess. And that I think is different. Meaning it is harder, you know, there's a smaller pool of available people who say managed and led UX teams for 20 years. They exist. They are definitely in the community. Some of them might be on this call, right? But there are simply fewer people

relative to the demand or need for people that experience. And that same kind of applies as you move to other parts of the organization. Practice like content design or something, I think has been accepted as a professional practice with a real focus on it much more recently, regionally. And so...

There aren't that many people who have really done it through that lens before. So you'll find people who are adapting and moving from other adjacent fields or other functions, maybe they're former designers or they're like copywriting leaders from an agency context and things like that. Great. Like all the right foundational skills and things, but they're just less experienced. You have someone moving from an agency world and they just, they don't have many years of working inside a in-house technology product company, building and shipping software products. And so that's,

That's really challenging. It just is. I think one of the most important things that we can do, that we're trying to do, but really any organization can do, is shift their orientation towards talent and

Or complement their existing orientation towards talent. To be as much about hiring for potential as hiring for experience. This kind of experience, it comes with time, right? You don't magically be like, oh, cool, it's better six months from now. Marginally, it might be. But actually, the kind of difference we're talking about is someone who's done it for three, four years.

That means you either bring someone from somewhere else or you wait three or four years. But I think the alternative version is to say, we're going to cultivate it ourselves. We're going to make it happen. It might take a different flavor or profile, you know, and we're willing to take the risk. It's okay if you haven't done it before. Here's an environment in which we figure it out. You develop that for the first time in this environment at varying levels, not just at sort of like entry levels into the profession, but even for other roles inside a team. Yeah.

And I think that's so important, I think, to invest time in developing people and building their capabilities in this case. And is your team still growing? Are you still hiring more people? Yeah, very much so. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. If I could make a public service announcement. Oh, yeah, please do. I think that today I'm probably hiring for maybe 30 people across the team.

research, design, writing, management roles, individual contributor roles. Yeah. What kind of talent are you looking for? Like what's some of the non-negotiables to be working at Grab? Oh, interesting. I'm probably various for different roles, but I think if I were to try to find common things, I think that actually one of the strongest attributes, and to me it's related to this hiring for potential as well, is when any candidate is able to show evidence that they have

sort of taken an interest in something that they have not done before and then figured out how to do it. Yeah. It doesn't even have to be designed. Now, of course you need some, maybe some foundational design skills to be like an entry-level designer. I'm looking for good typography and, you know, obviously you can use the,

Software tools, although that's all learnable. You can learn Figma fast. So the technical skills, I think, are learnable quite quickly. But this adaptability, the willingness to change and evidence that you can put your mind to something, and it might be ambiguous, you might self-educate yourself. This is really important, both in being adaptable into the discipline at all, but also once you're inside an organization.

Because the reality is an organization as big and complex, but also that moves as fast as ours, has tons of ambiguity. And so we do our work as leaders and managers to try to reduce that. But actually, individuals who are also good at navigating that themselves often find an easier time.

I think that makes a lot of sense. So you're looking at this strong inclination of being very curious and being adaptable. That's something you and your team members would be looking out for, for all candidates in the design team. Yes, yeah, for sure. I think the other thing, you know, when we think about it from a UX, like a product design standpoint, as we think about it, it's truly a, it is a multidisciplinary practice in a way.

You know, it's very plural, meaning that a designer on our team does some level of research. Now, of course, we have focused, dedicated researchers who are deep experts. They understand the research methodologies in a basic way that relate to UX. They execute designs themselves. They're like visual designers at some level. They understand the foundations there.

But they're also involved in product conception. So they need to think about the kind of utility and functional needs that meet a user's expectations or help solve the problems. It's a very multifaceted role. They might work closely with engineers

And so it's not to say that especially like a more early in their career designer has to know all of those things or have done all of those. But I think it's important for any candidate or people to understand that at some point they will likely, and they should indicate a desire or interest in that. You know, I think a very narrow definition of like visual design or as an example is not such a good fit for us because it's just not how we operate. We value visual design for sure.

But a designer who only focuses on visual design would have a hard time participating throughout the full product development process in the way we work. So in some way, having this T-shaped talent, right? The broad enough context, broad enough understanding of all the other disciplines and the ability to do some of that with a very deep expertise, at least in one of the fields. Would that be accurate? I would say that's accurate. Although I also think that this model, it's a good one. Like the metaphor of the T-shaped designers is a good one.

But I actually think that the designer of today and the future is more like a square or something, right? You're actually going deep in more areas. And again, that doesn't mean like everyone must be great at all these things today. Not at all. You know, that everyone's shape is not going to be a square. It's going to have holes and patches in it. But what I mean is that the

The shape of sort of a really powerful designer, I think in the future, you may be great at visual design, great at research, and moderately capable when it comes to maybe concepts around machine learning. That's interesting, right? And that's very different than saying like, oh, I'm going to be T-shaped and go deep on machine learning as it relates to design. I think you have to be able to connect it to some of these other disciplines and areas. So a level of generalism

is valued. You know, it's like expert at being a generalist. And so there's a level of depth implied there. It's not just, you know, the vocabulary or the conceptual understanding. It's like, actually, we can kind of practice and bounce around between these different ways of working. That makes a lot of sense. I think just being almost like a Swiss army life in some way in this context. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm seeing these questions in chat. Bill says, do you believe in niching and specialisms in this case then or generalized adaptability?

Personally, I think that generalized adaptable is a preferred model, but that is because it's where the different specializations like intersect that interesting, important, like valuable things happen. So I wouldn't say like go out and learn everything, but rather like continuously add to your knowledge or skillset. And if you're like pretty good at two, three, four things, that's awesome. You know, it's not like, oh, there's a list of 40 areas of design. And now I need to try to know a little bit about all of them.

That'll make for a good conversation, but maybe not that productive at work, right? So it's a balance. But I think the other important thing that is a great, connects to some of the earlier topics. I mean, maybe it's really about like individuals, actually. Of course we like,

We think about these things as these abstract buckets that we fill with ourselves. There's a product designer, and I will now be that thing. But a team is just a collection of individuals with a common purpose, common habits, and common behaviors. And the reality is we all have our

on paths, you know? And so, yes, from a professional standpoint, it's very reasonable to want to say like, what is expected? What are the things? How do I develop the skills that match that? Of course, you know, I wouldn't question anyone's motivation to do that, but also there's the things you're like passionate about or motivated by, right? And if you're

If the thing that is truly deeply interesting to you is like one thing, I think it's okay to be really passionate about that. Now you may need to be a little adaptable. How do you compliment that a little bit? But I wouldn't like take away from this, like, oh, I must go be a generalist now because you at your most passionate self will also be like a very productive and powerful self, you know? Yeah. So I don't want to discourage people or say like, you must fit in this mold.

It's a general territory, but within it, we are all like uniquely contributing. Yeah, and that relates so much to education, as you said, because when I think about education and all the...

degrees or all the other programs out there for example they're a little bit more like factory model where like hey to be a UX designer you need to be good at these things we're gonna train you to be good at these things you must know how to do a persona you must know how to do research and then you do all those things and then you tick all the boxes okay now you're out go go show your portfolio

And we advocate a very different approach, right? Because we value the previous experience each of our students have. Like some of them are great in a technical skill, like research, maybe they're from a market research firm. Some of them are really good visual designers and we just respect that and ask them to like be strong

and continue to be strong at that. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about design education and how should we be educating designers or future designers? Oh goodness. This is a hard, yeah. I mean, this may be a controversial statement. I'm not sure, but I actually think that the idea of educating specifically for the purpose of getting hired kind of misses the mark a bit. It's practical. Like it's very reasonable, but I think that the nature of the problems that we face,

deal with on a day-to-day basis and that we need our team to deal with are pretty complex and like wicked problems. Like it's more important that you can think and adapt than that you've learned any particular methodology, process, practice, right? And so this kind of like meta skill of learning to learn and being comfortable with not knowing some stuff

And then somehow figuring it out is extremely valuable in the professional context. And so when I think about like my dream state, how would education work? It looks a lot like within a student, and I think I've had this experience myself, so it's very meaningful to me. You realize or discover your own ability to learn, how you thrive in learning new information and applying it. That's the main thing.

skill, actually. And so in any particular program, you might be applying that skill in a bunch of other specific ways, these methodologies, these technical abilities, you know, this domain of information. But the most important part is actually that meta skill, because you will get on your job, you know, immediately, the thing will be different, you know, immediately, the team will be doing something you've never learned before.

which is normal and okay yeah okay so that's probably another thing your team members will look out for that ability to solve problems and as you said be adaptable in this case i understand that you you're running a community and back in new york city you've been part of many different communities

where you spend your career. So do you want to share a little bit about the community you're building over here or how you're engaging communities to do what you're doing as a design leader in this region? Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, I think that the community you're referring to is something we had put under the banner, like design in Southeast Asia.

The design in se.asia, which if you go there today, there's like basically a form will ask you to fill out like a Google form, sort of like collecting, essentially trying to build a high level view of where people's perceptions of the design professions and design disciplines are in the region. And selfishly, this was part of my own kind of like education, you know, around the region, but also to meet people and engage with them. But I think actually the most important part of this community has kind of emerged for us.

when I say us, there's a few other people now who are involved in helping kind of organize and think through some things, is intentionally being a compliment, what we view as like a compliment to some other things that are happening in the community.

It actually comes back to this kind of education point around sort of the professional bent or not. I think there are actually a good number of professional-oriented events, meaning they might be about some version of kind of networking or learning about opportunities or also more training-focused like communities. So we pass on knowledge to – here's a case study or here's how we do things in our organization. These are all important and valuable things.

But I feel like we didn't need another one of those. In fact, I'd just rather join an existing community and contribute to one that already is focused on those topics. Maybe this call is kind of like that. You don't need to duplicate that if there's already like a vibrant community focused around those things. And so what's come in the sort of design in Southeast Asia project is actually a compliment, almost like an aimless wandering group of people who are interested in design projects.

at almost like a cultural, like intellectual level. We have tons of interests. We think design is awesome. What is happening in design broadly speaking in Southeast Asia? Essentially a forum for some people to share some things they're interested in and working on, but it's not explicitly commercial at all. You know, it's not...

share this thing and get involved in it. It's actually just share this thing and enjoy that we shared it, you know? So it's, I would say we're trying to make it a bit lighter in that it's kind of like fun and not explicitly practical, but maybe it is also heavier sometimes because it's sometimes a bit more like, you know,

it's cultural or it's like academic you know there's like it's intellectually engaging on different levels so like do serious things but don't take ourselves too seriously yeah yeah i noticed that the conversations can be quite meta in the discussions yeah and it's been very helpful because i'm not

I got to engage with you a little bit more as well as talk to people like Luva from DBS and we got her over in an interview as well. So it's been wonderful meeting some other practitioners in this view. Any last words for our audience here who are listening? Any last advice or things you want to get through to them that you didn't manage to cover tonight?

I think I'm going to make a reference. I love to just read and absorb information. So I'm not promoting my own book, I promise. But I'm about two-thirds of the way through this wonderful new book by a guy named Ruben Pather called Caps Lock. Yeah.

It's awesome. Yeah, great designy reference. But the subtitle will give you a... It's a real thinker, but it's fun because it's highly visual. So lots of visual material to complement the writing. But the subtitle is How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design and How to Escape from It. It has a very strong point of view. Not to say that I agree with all of it, but it's a real helpful, I think, thought piece that gives some historical context to a lot of the work that designers do

do today and, you know, designs association with economics essentially in its early days, you know, the earliest like kind of proto designers were scribes who are largely employed to keep track of transactional records of Royal and merchant class people. Right. And so the deep history of things like data visualization, maps and cartography brand building in some sense, trust building, even when it comes to the design of currency and,

right? It's all kind of, you know, unpacked in this book. So it's really fun. And then you think about it in the contemporary context, you know, the work designers might do at a FinTech company to help people trust that software has a history to what, you know, some designers are doing in the, or proto designers were doing in the, you know,

1700s or something. What got you to read it? Did you want to read a quote or something? No, I'm just saying I recommend this book. It's like a recommended reading list. Awesome. Okay. Wonderful. And

Thank you so much, Randy, for joining us and sharing your experiences and giving us an insider look into your organization at Grab. So that's it for tonight. Please join us again next month for another session of working in UX design. It's been a pleasure talking about design leadership with you, Randy, and really, really excited that you're here in Singapore and you're helping coach

our talent and help our talent be better, help our communities be better. Excited to have you with us. Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate you. Thanks for inviting me today. And yeah, have a good evening, everyone. Have a good evening, everyone. Take care. Ciao. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please let me know what you think. Get in touch with me over email at mail at curiouscore.com. I would love to hear from you.

Do also check out our previous interviews and other free resources at curiouscore.com. And until next time, I'll see you on the next episode. Take care and keep leaning into change.