Gojek drives their 20+ services forward with Asana

Gojek is Southeast Asia’s leading on-demand platform that provides millions of users access to more than 20 services. From transportation, food delivery to digital payments and logistics, Gojek covers it all. In 2010, the company started as a call centre connecting ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers with consumers. Now Gojek has rapidly grown and generated strong consumer adoption for its range of services since the app launched in January 2015. This is a massive achievement but it hasn’t come without organisational challenges as the company has rapidly expanded.

Dian Rosanti serves as the Head of Product Management, Consumer Platform at Gojek. Her role is varied and focuses on product management, defining programs, and collaborating cross-functionally with leadership and departments like engineering and marketing. When Dian joined Gojek in early 2018 she identified a key challenge: teams were using different tools to manage their work which resulted in siloes and slowed down execution.

It was also difficult to plan projects and get initiatives off the ground because of minimal insight into product roadmaps and delivery schedules. To grow quickly and strategically, the company needed to properly track output and get aligned around clear objectives. Dian and the wider leadership team knew they needed a central work management tool for this to happen.

We needed more visibility into the work teams were doing and what we were launching, and the only way to do that is to all manage our work in the same platform.”

Choosing the right tool for all workflows

Gojek needed a platform flexible enough to manage a range of different workflows from product roadmaps to OKR planning to general program management. In short, all work that was non-technical needed to be managed in the same place. There were many work management tools used at Gojek at the time and Asana was one of them. Dian was already a fan of Asana, having used it in a previous role, so she knew teams could set up projects and workflows in their own way while still giving leadership the high-level visibility into progress that they needed. The ability to add the same task to multiple projects also meant no information would be lost between teams and everyone could track work in a way that suited them best.

Leaders around the business soon saw Asana was a really flexible platform that could be used by anyone. Because everyone has visibility into what’s happening, we’re able to eliminate duplicate work and keep everyone on the same page.”

Getting thousands of employees onboarded to Asana

Asana was first introduced to program and product management teams at Gojek. Dian’s colleague, Brandie Heinel, Global Head of Program Management, took charge and began organising how work would be managed. This included moving work into Asana with the help of their Customer Success Manager, who also ran training sessions to help employees learn how to use the platform. Leaders of product and program teams began to see how easy it was to assign work, plan meetings, and create clarity within their teams using Asana. Usage steadily increased as a result.

Next, Asana was introduced to the wider company. Two things helped encourage adoption. First, the Gojek leadership team used Asana to run monthly company meetings to track OKRs and performance. Collaborating and setting agendas for these meetings was easy in Asana and this encouraged everyone else to manage their work on the platform. Secondly, an Asana champions program was set up to lead grass-roots use across the company. Each month Gojek’s Customer Success Manager meets with their internal champions to discuss new features and use cases. The champions club helps everyone continue to see the value in Asana and bring new ideas back to their teams.

Once people started to experience how Asana brought clarity and alignment to their teams, we saw organic adoption rapidly pick up across the organisation.”

A new way of working with Asana

Gojek saves a total estimated 3,486 work days annually, or 697 weeks, by using Asana to coordinate and manage their work. Automation has been a big contributor to these time savings. Each month about 4,871 forms are submitted to streamline inbound requests, 151 projects are started from templates, and 21, 494 rules are run to automate workflow steps.

Here are some key ways teams at Gojek use Asana:

Objectives and key results tracking (OKRS)

OKRs are tracked by the leadership team in a public board so everyone can see company priorities. With this guidance, each team then sets their own OKRs. A template is used to turn each KR into a project with milestones and tasks.

Asana makes it easy to manage and track OKRs. Our entire company knows what the key priorities are and can plan, track, and report on work accordingly. It’s made us much more efficient so we can execute and scale faster.”

Leaders like Dian use Portfolios to track the KR projects that matter to them. KR leaders share regular status updates in Asana to explain how projects are tracking and if anything is at risk. Gojek also recently restructured internally and having public OKRs helped keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction regardless of all the changes happening.

Program management

Program managers group the projects they manage into portfolios. This allows them to see what’s on track at-a-glance and easily share progress updates with stakeholders. Leaders like Dian can access these portfolios at any time to see where initiatives stand. If there are questions that need to be answered or blockers to address, it’s as easy as leaving a comment or diving deeper into a project.

Product roadmaps

When COVID-19 broke out, Gojek, like other companies, had to quickly adjust their product plans. To keep track of everything, a COVID-19 product launch calendar was created in Asana. This calendar helped everyone see what was launching and when so they could quickly make team-level decisions, remove blockers from major projects, and deliver status updates efficiently. Similarly, product managers use Asana in this way to track the work each team member is doing for new launches and enhancements.

A future of improved alignment

There is less busywork happening across teams at Gojek now that they’re managing their work in Asana. Company OKRs are clear so priorities are transparent and individuals have a better sense for how their work ladders up. And by breaking down silos across teams and putting processes in place with templates, teams are able to execute faster and scale. This has led to a massive time saving of 3,486 work days per year previously spent coordinating work. With this extra time, Gojek has more time to innovate on their products to remove life's daily frictions by connecting consumers to the best providers of goods and services in the market.