Last week during the boot-camp there was a talk by the Aakash Dharmadihkari, Chief Product Officer @ GO-JEK.

He talked about a lot of things starting with the meaning of the word product and how design works.

He gave an example of how difference in design makes two people who are similar behave very differently. He talked about how two similar European countries have vastly different organ donation metrics as one has an opt-in system while another has a default opt-out system.

He also talked about what “designing for a user” is and why it is bad. When you design for a user you design for the average fictional user, while most of your users are on polar opposites. How do you solve this? Segmentation. You segment your users, some segments could be “Time Rich”, “Time Poor”, “Money Rich” etc. After you have identified your segments you can specifically design and market to them.

He later discussed various problem faced by the products team including handling cancellations and products that don’t give the desired outcomes.

The conversation again shifted to communication and how we should clearly define our labels. An example was given where due to miscommunication a bridge collapsed as there was a difference in units between the two countries connected by the bridge.

Aakash went on to discuss the “7 friends in 10 days” version of GO-JEK, which I am not sure if I can discuss here. He told how loyalty is a really big and open problem that needs to be solved. He joked about how solving loyalty takes months of data and GO-JEK is only a 2 year old company!