Data is the sixth sense of organisations, and it is a phenomenal tool that helps them make the right decisions, according to Gojek’s Group CTO Severan Rault. Companies need to rely on the data generated to determine whether they are doing a good job and providing the value they aspire.

“I would say data is the sixth sense of Gojek. It is crucial to understanding everything — from the behaviour of our staff to measuring the satisfaction of the customer and understanding the gaps and detecting fraudulent activity on our platform. If you consider the company as an organism, data is the sensor. Everything starts with sensory input,” he said in an interview with e27.

Also Read: Gojek taught me the importance of making data-driven decisions’: outgoing CTO Ajey Gore

Rault, who was appointed as the CTO in July 2020 following Ajey Gore’s quitting a month earlier, also concurred with the modern saying that data is the new oil. “At the end of the day, if you think about the global competitive landscape, successful companies are the ones that have managed to do things at a lower cost than their competitors and peers. This cost reduction comes from automation, which, in turn, is fuelled by data.”

According to Rault, who previously held key roles at Amazon and Microsoft, the role of CTOs has changed over the past decade. Previously, this role was to find a technical path for the product while the rest of the company was engaged in their works. In the new era, the CTO’s responsibility is to bring technology into every function of the organisation.

“Now, the role of the CTO is to also look at the areas of the company that can benefit from cutting-edge technologies like Machine Learning and automation or technologies that make processes more efficient. His role is now to evangelise technology, which is critical in every department — be it HR, finance, or marketing,” he added.

Want to become an on-demand company

Gojek is a Southeast Asian super app for ordering food, commuting, digital payments, shopping, hyper-local delivery, getting a massage and two dozen services. In May this year, Gojek and Indonesian e-commerce giant Tokopedia announced a merger to form GoTo Group.

Last month, airasia Digital (previously known as RedBeat Ventures), the digital arm of the Malaysia-based airline operator, acquired the Thailand operations of Gojek.

Rault said that Gojek wants to move from the idea of a super app to an on-demand company, meaning it wants to become a platform that gives its users everything they need very quickly. “Our merger with Tokopedia is part of this grant vision. Our long-term vision is that we want to make our customers’ lives easier by providing them what they exactly need when they need them, shortening the latency everywhere.”

Elaborating further, he said there are many things Gojek can do in areas such as sustainability and transportation. Asked whether Gojek has plans to foray into the passenger drones and delivery drones spaces, he said: “We are successful as a company because we make it easier for people to move inside Jakarta. We have the infrastructure. So when these technologies become viable and safe, we will be at the forefront of providing such services.”

Also Read: airasia acquires Gojek’s Thai operations as SEA’s supper app battle intensifies

In the interview, Rault also spoke about Gojek’s tight competition with Grab: “We respect our competitors but we’re not obsessed with them. We don’t compete with our rivals to draw people’s attention. We believe that we will win this competition by putting people at the centre of our product,” he noted. “What it means is that Gojek wants to understand its customers/users better, give them what they need when they need, and become a better tool to simplify our user’ lives.”

He also maintained that Gojek thinks of its users as a uniform set. But thanks to technology, the unicorn can start to consider each person’s individual needs and make its application better suited to that need.

“The flip side is that we also power the livelihood of many people in Southeast Asia, and we want to continue to be a great source of income,” Rault noted.

—

Image Credit: Gojek

The post ‘Gojek wants to move from the idea of a super app to an on-demand company for everything’: Group CTO appeared first on e27.

Leading a product team in a startup is very different from leading one at a well-established enterprise. Having joined Mixpanel in the early years and growing with it for close to a decade, I’ve learned that priorities change as you move from startup to scale up and then mature into an enterprise.

Startups: Prioritise ruthlessly

Startup companies are at a stage of their business where they are constantly experimenting to find product-market fit. The importance of product-market fit isn’t something to brush off — a 2019 CB Insights study found that “no market need” was the top reason why startups don’t succeed.

This is crucial for product teams and you need to be ruthless in prioritising product differentiators that allow you to solve user problems that your competitors can’t (or in a way that they don’t).

When you deliver a product that does that, your early customers become your biggest fans. They’ll value your product and that will make up for areas where you may be a bit rough around the edges.

This happened in the early days at Mixpanel.

There was a time when if you forgot your password, you’d actually have to write to someone in Support to manually reset it for you. At that time, we (rightly) concluded that our success wouldn’t hinge on the availability of a self-service Forgot Password flow and focused our resources on other, more impactful product features.

Scaling up: Listen to your customer

Once your business starts to scale, the focus switches to matching innovation with follow-through. This is the time when you’ll need to start ironing out the little kinks.

At Mixpanel, we were so far ahead of everyone else by this time. The mistake we made was that we branched out into more things when we should have been focused on building more depth in our product and fixing existing problems. Innovate on doing what you already do better; not on doing more things.

Also Read: Monk’s Hill Ventures head of talent’s guide to startup jobs search in Singapore

As you grow, your customers become your most valuable asset. Their complaints, feedback, input, and feature requests are all invaluable sources of information that inform your product strategy. Take time to listen to them and understand how they’re using your product and what they’re using it for.

Enterprise: Stay nimble and think like a startup

So what happens when you’re an established player? You’ll find yourself on the other side of the fence. Where you were once the hot, innovative startup that’s disrupting the market, some startup is now disrupting your business.

That’s why it’s important to stay nimble and innovative even as you grow. One way to do this is to keep decomposing your teams into units that can function efficiently, almost as if they were little startups within your company.

For example, Amazon tries to break their engineering teams into “two-pizza” teams  — essentially you’ll only need two pizzas to feed the entire team.

In my own experience, when it comes to software development, a unit consisting of a product manager, a designer, and a few engineers functions really well. This unit can make its own decisions without a ton of authoritative coordination with other people.

You’ll certainly need to balance this autonomy with the broader corporate vision. An example of this is how Netflix aims for “context, not control” (you can take a look at their culture deck here). This balance is built by instilling a sense of purpose.

If your teams know why they’re doing what they do and how that feeds into the business’s success, they’ll make decisions on their own, yet stay aligned to the company’s goals. The key is to make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of endless meetings, check-ins, and red tape that make your company slow and bureaucratic.

There’s nothing quite like watching your product team and business grow from startup, to scale up and progressing on the path to becoming an established enterprise. My experience at Mixpanel has been a rewarding journey that’s both inspiring and creatively satisfying.

The trick is for us, as product leaders, to keep as much of that agile one-team atmosphere and focus that helped to drive our growth while learning to cede responsibilities to our teams as they continue to build on what we created.

–

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast or infographic

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

Image Credit: primagefactory

The post How to be an effective product team manager as your grows appeared first on e27.

The post SME lending during the pandemic: Is it sensible or unwise? appeared first on e27.

Thai accounting SaaS firm FlowAccount has raised US$4 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India, Tech In Asia reports.

US-based Money Forward and Japan’s SBI Investment also participated.

The new funds will be used to expand the platform’s functionality while also increasing its small-business offerings. Anticipating to become a pandemic winner, the firm also plans to grow beyond accounting into fields of payments, e-commerce, and fintech.

“Our vision is to become the go-to, seamless solution for anyone starting a new business in Thailand and beyond,” Kridsada Chutinaton, CEO and co-founder of FlowAccount, said told the publication.

Launched in 2014, FlowAccount is an online accounting firm using the cloud SaaS to help freelancers, small business owners, and accountants in Thailand handle their accounting, payroll, and expense tasks on a single platform. The startup claims its services are used by 50,000 clients and are connected with banks and e-commerce platforms.

Also read: Sequoia Surge’s new cohort comprises a vegan makeup startup, an innovative email marketing platform and more

Earlier this year, Thai 70-year-old bank KBank offered its 1,000 SME customers the FlowAccount solution to help them run more efficiently by keeping them updated on their financial status timely, controlling costs more adequately, and obtaining better access to funding sources.

In 2017, FlowAccount had raised US$1.15 million in a pre-Series A round led by Beacon VC, Kasikornbank’s venture capital arm, with participation from SBI Investments, Singapore’s Golden Gate Ventures, and Thailand’s 500 Tuk Tuks.

Global tech research firm Gartner predicted that Thai enterprise software spending would grow 13.6 per cent to 45.9 billion baht (US$1.4 billion) in 2020. In another report, Gartner indicated that cloud spending in Thailand could grow 28.2 per cent to 34.4 billion baht (US$1.1 billion) in 2022.

—

Image credit: FlowAccount

The post Thai accounting SaaS startup FlowAccount nets US$4M to scale its small biz offering appeared first on e27.

Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, with the ups and downs, challenges and changes that we are all experiencing in recent times, the way of working and organisational decision making have entered a new era. Enterprises must reassess their digital transformation strategies and core competitiveness in a timely manner.

Through advancing enterprise agility, it accelerates the speed of digital transformation, innovation and other new processes. Hence, it is essential to adopt the right enterprise agility strategy for your organisation.

Impact on business

While enterprise agility is very different from agile software development, many parallels and principles can be drawn from the Agile Manifesto and Agile Principles beyond the context of IT.

Applying the spirit of elaboration, harmonisation and user-first approach from software to enterprise agility in providing services, is one of the centre themes of  current Agile thinking. In other words, agility must be manifested within the enterprise DNA to generate value.

Imagine a traditional enterprise, burdened with legacy processes, systems and policies that are decades old that no one questions, “Why?”; intertwined with politics, silos and a culture of fear, where people do not feel free to voice out their feedback and ideas.

What if we can transform that organisation into one that is highly collaborative and interactive; focused on products and services that customers want; quick to respond to change and feedback, thus having a competitive advantage in stability and flexibility.

All the while keeping pace with an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Sounds too good to be true? In that case, enterprise agility is crucial more than ever for such transformation.

As part of the global agile research, McKinsey analysed the impact of enterprise-wide agile transformation, and their preliminary results identified three main outcomes of agile transformation: improved customer satisfaction, employee engagement and operational performance.

Also Read: A sneak-peek at the 28 startups joining NUS Enterprise’s SEA Booster Programme

The benefits are complementary to each other leading up to the fourth result: improved financial performance.

It starts with connected teams

You may be well aware of the numerous disrupters you face every day. It is not just the unpredictability of what is to come, it is also the velocity and pace of change that is creating silos and inefficiencies with your biggest asset– your people.

Can we get real-time visibility, can we align every team with the company strategy; can we optimise the internal workflow to enhance customer value?

All that has led to a fundamental question, how do we harness the power of digital transformation and enable new ways of working? Today’s market demands a higher level of cross-team collaboration and movement in order to successfully compete.

• Dev and IT need to work closely together to ship delightful customer experiences.
• Marketing and support teams may need to prepare for weekly or daily launches as product changes roll out faster.
• Finance and sales teams may need to be aligned to adapt to new pricing and packaging models.
• Executive teams need to make sure that shifting priorities gets reflected in the work that gets done.

These are just some examples of the cross-collaboration that modern companies need to adopt, but the bottom line is – it cannot just be your software teams that operate in an agile fashion.

The best innovation emerges when teams across your organisation are able to work better together.  As the leader in your organisation, you have the opportunity to lead your teams into this agile way of working.

How to scale with enterprise agility

As your business grows and objectives evolve,  your teams have to navigate even more complexity– across departments, business units, regions and timezones. The demands on modern teams increases the complexity of teamwork.

• Can you adjust your budgets and resources monthly or even weekly?
• How do you identify and resolve bottlenecks?
• Are you able to make tradeoffs decisions or pivots without having all the information?
• How do you account for changes in work allocation across teams, products and platforms, and are you able to properly staff the most important initiatives?
• What are all the dependencies between your teams and do you have visibility to them before they become a problem?
• How do you set objectives and ensure the entire company is aligned to the same goals?

Our experience shows that there are two things you need to master at scale. You need to be able to build the capability for your business and technical teams to rapidly deliver solutions while at the same time linking the work your teams are doing with clear outcomes and objectives.

How do we do this? One way is to provide a connected platform that takes into consideration your business’s strategic direction; identifies the outcomes that are important for your business; and connects them from epics to features to stories and tasks at the working level, in order to achieve clear alignment for management, business and technical teams.

Again, why do organisations take on this change to enterprise agility at scale？

Also Read: Why it is time to reinvent The Agile Manifesto to answer challenges of a remote team

Here are a few examples of how we have seen companies winning customers as they have pursued their transformation goals.

• Decreasing time to market – in helping one customer tackle predictable delivery, we helped them to reduce their time to market by 40-50 per cent
• Improving quality – uncovering duplicative work, a major cost savings to the customer, which never would have happened if their work was not visible and connected across the organisation
• And finally, the opportunity to reduce the variance in team tooling and need for manual reporting. A single solution powered by real-time team tool data solves complexity and creates savings along the way.

Here is just a sample of the companies that have embraced enterprise agility. Ready to unlock the potential of your enterprise?

–

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast or infographic

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

Image credit: Orla

The post Unlock your enterprise agility to unleash the potential of your startup appeared first on e27.