Gojek Reviews

I was at GoJek for around a year - Built out and launched key products, interacted directly with CEO/ CXO/ SVP/ leadership. Few observations : - Lack of data-driven decision making - There's no culture of evidence (qualitative/ quantitative) based product strategy. Just ideas made up in the air based on "visionary thinking of the CEO" or some hearsay/ article read by some SVP. They'd change their decisions over the fly over a couple of Whatsapp conversations without full context of the decision. - Project Management (and not Product management) - When I joined, I was pleasantly surprised that GoJek got so big with the current product culture - but after a few months, I realised that the success of GoJek was its ability replicate US/ India/ China models in a greenfield market like Indonesia really quickly. Not focusing on innovation, but focusing on rapid replication + delivery. Not focusing on iterative experimentation, but just speed of shipping features. Works/ worked for Indonesia, but detrimental to the growth of a Product manager's leadership/ analytical thinking. - *Very* hierarchal - The decisions are pushed downwards from the SVP/ GM/ CXO, and the Senior Product managers act like Project managers executing a mandate given from the top. It was sad to see limited bottom-up input in Product strategy (akin to Chinese product work culture). - Lack of management & top-tech exposure at the leadership level - Although there's a lot of fan-fare around how the CEO is a game-changer for Indonesia (and maybe its true from an Indonesian context), I believe there's a lack of management/ leadership at the CXO/ SVP level. Few in the senior leadership have exposure working at Top-tech companies (FAANG/ Tier 2 Tech) previously, leading to a lack of understanding around how to build product teams, and building the right product culture. - Indo favouritism at the leadership level - There's a sense of favouritism if you're an Indonesian at the leadership level. That's an accepted fact across the company (and sometimes even acknowledged by the leadership in the name of patriotism) - but is very unhealthy and non-inclusive in the long run. Lots of areas of improvement for Gojek. Scale of product in a greenfield market != Successful work culture. Please lay a huge emphasis on improving the same.

- messy startup environment, not much documentation, have to learn most things yourself - politics amongst VPs and C-level that sometimes trickles down as lack of cooperation, pushing the blame game between teams, needless disagreements, blockers - good/bad experience depends heavily on team; teams with bad VPs really suffer - senior leadership is mainly external hires, path to promotion is unclear, co-founders seem biased against training own staff - lack of engineering and financial support for smaller products outside indonesia, feels like you're a second-class citizen in the company