Getting alignment & building trust with our stakeholders

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: [email protected] 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: [email protected]

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.