Scaling culture at GO-JEK

By Ravi Suhag

In a hyper-growth organization like GO-JEK, technology plays a vital role. However, as an organization matures, the hard part is not scaling the technology, but paying heed to culture.

For us at GO-JEK, culture is a collective philosophy about how to build products that change lives. We all do our bit to make sure it‘s transparent and open to innovation.

Trust

A great way to understand an organization is to ask, “Why should someone work there?”

For me, it’s the people. And it’s not just me, most of us at GO-JEK will have a similar answer. We are here because of each other.

This isn’t to say that we don’t disagree — like any group of passionate, opinionated people, we disagree often. And that’s the essence of working in a a dynamic engineering org like GO-JEK. Trust is everything.

Ownership

From my personal experience, a lot of companies talk about being “people first,” but most don’t practice the mindset of what it takes to be truly people first.

For us, it is about distributing ownership to everyone in the team. This ownership gives everyone responsibility to put their best and gives meaning to daily work.

Empathy

Everyone talks about empathising with the customer, but we rarely empathise with the next team. They’re often reduced to a binary absolute: The Magical Team, or the Useless team.

Either way, it makes engagement and collaboration difficult, because nobody empathises with an ideal. At GO-JEK, to overcome this, we encourage regular, short term movements from one team to another. It’s not unusual for a person to move teams to pick up a technology they’re interested i,n or pair on solving a common problem.

Humility

People without ego are a luxury in the current times. Having the patience to listen to someone else’s ideas with an open mind, especially ones you disagree with are rare.

We do our utmost to get this right. As our Group CTO, Ajey, says in his post on our engineering principles, every decision is the right one at the time it’s made.

Ambition

As individuals and as a team, we never let ourselves get too comfortable — whether it’s about knowing a piece of technology, scaling for hyper-growth or achieving new milestones every day.

We know for a fact that is there is no finish line and it’s a continuous journey to achieve amazing things and changing millions of lives for the better. We grew 900x in 18 months and still rapidly doubling. Being part of this journey is nothing short of exhilarating.

It’s not like we have the answers

We don’t claim to know what it takes to build a culture that can scale. What makes a difference, though, is that each of us is willing to try. Making that extra effort to learn, listen and grow together.

You can see this happening in our every day conversations. Every piece of code we ship and our efforts to make sure our customers have a better experience.

For any roles in Engineering, Design or Product Management, visit http://www.gojek.io/careers