Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Design Explorers by Agoda Design

Behind the scenes of creating compelling experiences for our millions of customers, we’re designing and optimizing property partner management products to support complex business scenarios for the B2B side. Today we have Arash, Title, and Rachel from the enterprise team to share what is like to work on the various product under the umbrella of Enterprise team.

On this part 1 of our mini series, we deep dive into each team at Agoda Design. Today, we have Travel Platform team with us and share their day to days as well as highlight and challenges.

In this episode we interviewed Deven and Brie from design leadership to share their experience about relocation, design team culture and the growth opportunities in Agoda. We dived into what it’s like to work in Agoda as people manager and how they help shape the culture of the design team over the years. Last but not least, Deven and Brie shared the qualities we are looking for in a candidate during interviews.

On today’s episode we get to know our new co-host, Rachel. She has been working at Agoda for 5 years and will be sharing the story of her hiring experience compared to Yuki’s, and pre-pandemic vs. during. We also have announcements for upcoming episodes so make sure you stay tuned to the end!
For any feedbacks or questions, feel free to contact us at: designexplorers@agoda.com
Looking for design opportunities at Agoda? Check out careersatagoda.com

Our guest today is Yuiko Majima, a senior product designer at our team who works on our customer experience group internal tools, where she gets to manage different stakeholders and to work with different parts of our business.

Yuiko is here today to share with us how she manage and work with so many stakeholders and her interesting and quite unique background in sales and project management, before transitioning into design. 

In our show today we are talking with Alexis Collado, Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer at Swarm - a trust-based community of builders, founders, and investors collaborating on awesome projects.

Alexis takes us through his inspiring journey from when the time he used to be an intern at Agoda, his challenges and frustrations of finding the right opportunities for his design jobs early on in his career, and how all that lead him to the conclusion and realization that he should make his own fate.

Determined and motivated by his passion for design, not only he managed to develop his own successful career and create those opportunities to himself, he has been dedicated to the mission of enabling and making it easier for designers from all over the world (and specially his hometown in the Philippines) to practice and learn important skills by building communities that are based on knowledge sharing and professional networking.

In this talk Alexis share with us what does it take to build a design community? Where do you start, and how do you scale it? And why despite being an introvert, he thinks networking is a crucial skill designers should nurture and develop as part of the their toolbox.

Design workshops have become a very popular activity designers love to initiate as a great tool for solving all sorts of problems or coming up with new ideas.

But the true power of workshops and what make them really successful is lay down in their process and engagement with the different activities rather than the outcome or end results they were originally designed to achieve.

In our opening episode for season 2 of Design Explorers, Yuki and I have sat down to learn from Danyao how she use design workshops for stakeholders alignment and bringing in all the different perspectives and domain knowledge from individuals within product teams to better define problems and discover new possibilities.

In this 10 and last episode of season 1 of Design Explorers, Nahum & Yuki sat down for a recap and talk about how the idea of the podcast actually began.

Sharing their personal stories and experiences so far, they discuss some of their learnings as well as their struggles along the way, and how they overcome those.

We really hope you enjoyed seasons 1 and have more exciting episodes coming next year with season 2, so stay tuned for that!

Meanwhile, if you want to share your feedback or suggestions with us, you can reach out to us at: designexplorers@agoda.com

In this episode we are talking with Alex and Fendy about how they managed and led our design team migration from using a few several design tools such as Sketch, Zeplin and others into the Figma experience.

Figma is now considered as the de facto tool for product and interaction design, and in recent years, it took the world of design by storm.

Alex and Fendy worked with our designers to make sure this migration could go smooth enough without interrupting their work.

Tune in to learn how they did that as they share those learnings and more insightful stories.

Design Studio is a dedicated platform for knowledge sharing between the more experienced designers and new joiners or anyone who is facing different challenges with their work and projects in our design team at Agoda. By providing practical guided frameworks and inspiring use cases, more seasoned designers can help the less experienced ones with their weaknesses through this platform. We invited Andre to our show to tell the story behind the idea of initiating and launching Design Studio, talk about Impostor syndrome, lifelong learning, and his awesome passion for making 3D art.

As our design team started to grow and scale, the need for enhanced processes and workflows to support our day to day jobs and the way we collaborate began to emerge.

In todays episode we discuss with Anita and Eark, two of our Senior Product Designers, how they discovered and realized that need, and how they have used their design skills to help improve the way we work together.

By identifying some of the pain points and roadblocks that our design teams and individual designers are facing, they've developed frameworks and workflows to help mitigate some of these issues to ensure we provide a consistent and optimized users experience for our customers and partners.

They are writing code but they're also using design tools and have a deep understanding of the user experience and the aesthetics. Design engineers are new and emerging roles that aim to close the gap between the worlds of design and code.
Today we're talking with Sofian and Latte, two members of our design engineering team who are going to share with us more details all about that. 

Getting good and inspiring guidance in the beginning of our career is crucial for our success to become great designers. That is where mentors plays such an important part in our journey. Today, we're joined by Rachel and Pang, a mentor and a mentee, who gonna share with us their mutual mentorship experience in our design team at Agoda.

If you wish to join the Agoda mentorship program mentioned in this episode, please visit the link below for more details:

https://www.tds.tu.ac.th/gamificationdesign/

Customer support agents at Agoda are working hard every day around the clock to provide our customers and partners any help they need. Their work processes and procedures can become really complex using different tools and handling many touch points. In our talk today, we discuss with Sabrina and Haeji how they help simplify and enhance our agents work through design, and what are some of the similarities and differences when you are trying to solve your colleagues problems? 

When Dynin joined Agoda in 2015, there were only 5 designers in the design team. Starting out in his position as an individual contributor, he didn’t know that he was about to grow that same team to almost 50 designers as of today.

Back then, there was a need to prove the additional value that our design organization can bring to the table, and he took on himself the mission and vision to make it happen.

Discussing the meaning and implications of a team's maturity, in this episode 3 of the Design Explorers, Dynin Khem, our Design Director, is sharing the story and his perspective of the ongoing journey of scaling up our team.

Is there a real difference between design for B2B vs design for B2C? How do enterprise designers simplify the complexity of big problems?

Join us for episode 2 of the Design Explorers in which we are joined by Mehak Sharma and Hanxi Lee, two of our Senior UX Designers at Agoda, to better understand the interesting and complex world of our supply partners through their work on hotel-facing products.

Can data play a meaningful role in design solutions and processes – or should designers stick to experience and visuals, and leave dealing with data to math people? Join us as we explore these questions and more with Design Manager Joshua Zhou and Senior UX Designer Javier Lo, who together actually tried making data relevant to our design team. Did they succeed? Find out.

Episode notes
Book recommendation: A Practical Guide to Designing with Data by Brian Suda
https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Designing-Data-ebook/dp/B0058ZWZ8C