2021 - Learnings from Grab

Published on 2022-01-08

Intro

Initially when I joined the Grab Analytics’ team as part of our first 20-30 members, I thought that I would stay at Grab for 5 years. How I envisioned myself having an impact on the team was having a strong foundation of domain knowledge and building long lasting relationships. Even though I did not hit this personal goal (I was there for 3 years 7 months), I did learn a few lessons which I would carry with me into my next role.

1. When no one knows your name, it can be a good thing

I spent two years in Grab’s architecture team working on Food, Mart and Merchants data. The data marts we built eventually grew to service virtually all analysts, country and business operations teams. We put many measures into place to uphold reliability for our critical pipelines. These measures included bots to report breached SLAs, automated scripts to detect data issues (duplicates, missing data), proactive documentation and centralised slack channel for all communications. Our robust protocols gave us the lead time to fix issues before resulting in downstream impact, which held the crisis at bay. Personally I felt that our team had a great work ethic, we were mainly behind the scenes but our visibility came through at the undeniable support ratio of 1 analyst:100 end users. I always joked that if people forgot all about the datamart team, it meant that the pipeline was so smooth it just works!

2. Take the initiative to steepen your own learning curve

I was fortunate that Grab supported internal job mobility. When I observed that my work portfolio remained unchanged for three half year reviews, I took a leap of faith to initiate a role transfer internally. From an architecture role, I shifted into a product analytics role to dive deep into experimentation and product impact sizing. From the get go, I found that my expertise in pipeline building and advanced SQL knowledge immediately created value in my new team. However my weaknesses in critical thinking (eg. defining success metrics) became very glaring. I struggled for a good six months before I was able to consistently provide recommendations and anticipate questions from stakeholders. In spite of the struggles, I truly felt like I had diversified my skill set. Building mental muscle comes only with change.

3. Your team’s needs will steer your development

In the analyst role, there are roughly three aspects to hone: technical skill sets, domain knowledge and data storytelling. Before internal mobility, I was fortunate enough to serve internal stakeholders. Given the team’s slower pace, I had spare bandwidth to tinker with passion projects and build a well balanced knowledge base around machine learning, script automation. I was clearly building up my technical skill set. Post shifting into a higher paced product team with aggressive revenue targets, my time was consumed with interacting with cross functional stakeholders. As I had a bigger role to play as part of a product team, this placed a higher emphasis on my communication and soft influence skills. Your team will naturally play a big extrinsic motivator to how you develop your skill sets in the short-mid term. If you identify your own strengths and pair it with the team’s needs, this could supercharge your growth as well.

4. Take your seat at the table

As a product analyst, I was often pulled in to help prioritize efforts (“how many users are impacted by this feature gap?”) or assess the root cause of a bug (“Is it product or supply issue?”). Analysts play a crucial role to steer the team’s direction, yet the challenge I faced was that the data can be highly interpretable. At an early stage of my role, I tend to fall into the trap of giving teams data insights that support “what they want to hear” instead of playing the neutral role. While this may be the easy way to appease stakeholders, our role can go beyond validating product decisions to discovering opportunities. Owning the domain space and forming our own opinions help us to bring strong hypotheses to the table. This intuition comes with time and product understanding, it helps us drive more impact as analysts.

5. No one will protect your time except yourself

I personally document my work on a weekly basis, keeping track of tasks from ongoing projects to adhocs. It helps me to keep track of where I am spending most of my time week on week, month on month. Within a few months, I would then be able to clearly review where I spend an outsized amount of time for very little output/outcome. Given the fast paced environment, it pays off to reflect on where your time can be better spent given that it is your most scarce resource. I constantly rely on the Eisenhower matrix which puts urgency and importance on x and y axes respectively. With this matrix, I would then start to discern which quadrant each incoming task falls into. By stack ranking tasks based on past recent experiences, you can then ruthlessly prioritise your time to hand pick the highest impact tasks and push back on the rest. This helps to manage your work life balance as well, given that you will plan bandwidth within your means.

6. Having one mentor is good, having many mentors is even better

While I was at Grab, I personally participated in four different mentorship programmes. Mentors are an immense resource! I view mentorship as a two way collaboration over time; as much as I learn from them, I also hope to share with them my progress as their fruits of labour. I find that having mentors from different backgrounds plays a huge advantage in my growth. Across my four mentors, they are from consulting, strategy, business operations and product backgrounds respectively. Naturally their perspectives on work and life issues are varied, and their rationale in decision making also sheds light on many blind spots which I may have. So often I would bring the same question to all four mentors for guidance, and it really translates into a richer understanding of how I might approach a career choice. For eg, in changing roles internally to a product-centric role - a product manager might offer perspective on driving product impact while a consultant might emphasize honing your skills on strategic decision making. Everyone’s value add is different, and each conversation gives me more angles to evaluate my ongoing struggles.

Overview

Overall this might just be an oversimplified world view around my takeaways in the past ~4 years. The objective I have around writing this blog is not just to share with fellow peers, but also to remind myself of my perspectives later on. I could change my entire decision making matrix, who knows! It’s helpful to pen my thoughts down to articulate my biggest career values, so that from time to time, I can review them and revise them as reflections. Thanks for making it this far!