Jan: Hello Amelia, thank you for taking the time. You have quite a journey behind you in your life so far, living and working in multiple cities, in different countries, experiencing various cultures. Can you talk about your journey so far? How did it all begin?
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Amelia: Hello Jan, thank you for having me. I was born and raised here, but left Indonesia because of the 1998 riots—as the home I was in was raided. My dad then sent me out overseas to Malaysia, then to Singapore. Later, I returned to Jakarta because I couldn't find a job when I finished my studies. I was a diploma graduate, not many jobs there for foreigners at my level in early 2000 in Singapore.

I managed to get my first design job in Jakarta, but the problem was that I had many ideas that were seen as a bit too “futuristic” for some of the clients. They were like, "Oh, this is a bit too progressive for us. We couldn't use these ideas yet." And that kind of made me feel like, "Oh, maybe this is not the place for me." So, I left Indonesia by choice this time.

I went back to Singapore for a third year Undergraduate, could not find a job in Singapore (again), I decided to go on with my friend’s idea to explore China, so I moved, never realizing that it would be for so long. My original plan was to go there for six months for a Mandarin course. And then at the end, I left after nine years, just crazy.

You have been a design leader for a long time. I am curious about your approach to a design leadership role. When you join an organization like Traveloka, how do you usually connect with different stakeholders to enable the company to be more customer-centric, possibly even design-led? How do you make sure that the design is more embedded within the business?
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I have been lucky to join a great design team at Traveloka. I think the mindset, the customer-centric mindset came from the co-founder himself, which is fantastic. His name is Albert. He's one of the three co-founders, and he was the one that advocates a lot for the customer needs. Powerful advocacy from the co-founder makes it easier.

From that perspective, at Traveloka, we are lucky because design has always got a seat at the table. Now, my job is to continue that legacy, and to make meaning in terms of, "So what are we going to do with it? I got invited to all of these meetings. What other value can I bring to the table?"

We're still trying to figure it out. I'm quite new to this job; this is only my second year. I would say that from my experience so far, a close relationship is built based on your credibility, as much as trust that forms out of it.

There is this framework that I adopted from IDEO. There are three things: there's a craft, there are relationships, and there's impact. Those are the three significant areas that you can hone to build your credibility in an organization.

I also instill this mindset in my designers. There are about 70 of them now. You have to be good at what you do first to gain credibility. And then, you need to involve people during the process, build a relationship over time. Hopefully, there is a positive impact on you putting in the craft, involving the people, and then creating a product together. I would say that’s the credibility framework that we use a lot.

What I learned from consulting practice is keeping the stakeholders informed along the way—not waiting for your final decision to only then tell them—to involve them during the process early. We try to build from their ideas, as they are intelligent people. They understand perspectives that designers don't. The way is to cross-pollinate those ideas and then to utilize the power of storytelling to get people aligned.

You were born and raised in Indonesia, currently the biggest economy in Southeast Asia with a quarter of a billion people, thousands of islands, various cultures, and environments. The country seems to be having a moment right now. We can see some famous startups coming out. We can see more and more people involved in the tech scene. How would you describe the role of design in Indonesia? Can you talk about the ecosystem and what's happening there at the moment?
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You mentioned the right keyword there, which is an ecosystem. I feel like with a big nation like ours; we are the fourth most populous nation in the world; we have over 17,500 islands. It's super diverse. The culture from the west to the east of the country is entirely different. You take a two-hour boat ride arriving at another island, and they have completely different belief systems. It's fascinating. I think the ecosystem itself is what we're trying to do. And I believe design could be the linkage to bring everything together.

The role of design, obviously it's massive. I guess probably what we need to address first is what does design means. In Traveloka, we define it as a rendering of intent. It could mean designing a lot of things. How do you want to design something and make it purposeful?

I would say that Indonesia also has a lot of young population, which is very tech-savvy. They're comfortable embracing technology. It's amazing to think like, you know, somebody who is sitting in the countryside is accessing and enjoying the user experience of all of these tech giants—Google Maps, YouTube, Instagram, you name it—which is also experienced by those in London or New York.
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And Indonesians also enjoy the local digital products, like Traveloka’s superapp or other technology companies from Indonesia. Whereas in the Western countries like in America or Europe, they may be less exposed to the superapp concept in a way as there's already a very mature technology there.
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I feel like there's a lot of innovation that you can expect to come out. Indonesia has a very creative landscape. As Southeast Asia’s lifestyle superapp, we continuously explore innovative solutions. For example, two of Traveloka's creations would be: 1) We're doing a livestream for travel and lifestyle products. We're building an in-house capability for this. 2) Our financial service team enables the underbanked people to conveniently and easily get access to financial services through our PayLater product. I think the potential is massive. We are just at the beginning.

You live in Bali right now. I think we can say that COVID certainly boosted prospects of remote working globally. How do you see this evolving? Do you see that more and more people or companies in the region will adopt this approach?
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It has been quite a year, of course. I think we have to be very specific when it comes to the sectors that enable remote work. Not many sectors are doing that. Indonesia is still heavily reliant on, for example, the mining industry, the manufacturing industry, and so on. And obviously, they don't have that kind of advantage, but for a tech company like ours and a few others, this pandemic is like a massive remote work experiment.

Having moved to Bali in November 2020, this is my fifth month here; I think what I uncovered is that the infrastructure is not yet properly set up for continuous remote work. For example, many places that I stay don't even have a proper table and chair for office work style because they are resorts. They have good beds; they have pool chairs. And then high-speed internet access could be scarce too in areas like Candi Dasa, with lesser variety of food access. When you're working on Zoom from nine to five with not much time to cook, you’d want something you can order instantly and with variety.

But I could see that a lot of these places are adapting very rapidly. And this is part of my job and gives advice on some of the places that I've stayed at and what else they can do to support people like myself who can work remotely. But in the future, I think there's also a downside to working remotely. We already heard about Zoom fatigue. You know, managers sometimes do not know how to, including me, maintain the people's morale over a long period of time. Because I guess remote working during COVID and before COVID is very different. Before COVID, you can still go out and work in a cafe. In COVID time, you can't. It's just you and your room and the screen. It's very different.

I would like to think that we can enable this more. It has to do with how we set up our offices as well. You know, putting small little things, like having a big screen that everybody can be captured and then having the mics in front of everybody so that the sound comes through. Little things like that, I think, need to be set up. Ideally, we could do half and half. Or maybe a third and two-thirds in  allowing the kind of flexibility while, at the same time, the need for seeing another person, your colleagues face-to-face in the same room, is still essential.

Many people in leadership positions are struggling to maintain the hold on their teams and keep motivation levels high, as you just pointed out. Do you have anything to share from your own experience? How to perhaps mitigate or even solve these issues?
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For me, the way I resort to this would be... I'm very passionate about the world of learning. Last year, we established the Design Academy for Traveloka. We do a lot of training online, and then we invite external trainers to speak on specific subjects.

We conducted events. We call it, A Night to Celebrate Failure Stories (in Indonesian: Pada Suatu Malang, a pun from ‘once upon a night’). We invited storytellers from Design and from outside of the Design function too, to share their stories of “failures”. And then we have Kafe Socrates, which is a night where we ask big questions in life ‘cos life is not just about design, there are so many other exciting topics that we can argue and discuss. We’ve got one of our Designers telling her WFH story here, which quite represents how we all learn to adjust.

When it comes to the online, remote-working world, I think the design team that exists within their little mission group; they do like a chill-out afterhour. We also have an unofficial room where anybody can go in at any time and see who's there and then work online together in silence, or play online games as a bonding activity. Little things like that. I think that has been helpful. But mainly at this point, we just moved our HQ as well. We have this new, beautiful environment in BSD (just off of Jakarta), and everybody cannot wait to go back.

Moving on from design and work life, ... If you could choose any movie or any artwork you would like to spend one day in, what would that be?
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I guess my definition of art is maybe different from yours. To me, just looking out at sea and the greeneries, that to me is good enough of an art, exactly like the view I am having here in Bali right now.