One on One with: Keatyin Chin

Introducing One on One, our new series where we take a moment to chat to our Heroes across the global Delivery Hero team and ask them: what do you do?

In order to demystify the various job titles, we take an in-depth look at what they really mean and give a behind-the-scenes peek at the inner workings of the company. Read on to find out more about what Delivery Hero's own Keatyin Chin of foodpanda Singapore does on a daily basis, why she likes her job, and what her day-to-day actually entails.

What is your job title and which team and which brand are you part of?

My job title is Director of Product for the Asia-Pacific market (APAC). I am part of the Pandora Product and Tech Team at foodpanda in Singapore.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My day is usually split up into two parts - mornings with APAC markets and post-lunch with Berlin. Interestingly, it is never really a routine, but an ongoing mode of prioritizing the problems to solve, and unblocking anything that my team needs support or guidance on.

We have been growing immensely over the last three years and this comes with multiple changes that we need to introduce to our teams and processes - the process that worked when we had five people in the team no longer works with 50 people; the process that worked when we had 50 people in the team no longer works when we have 500 people. I spend a lot of time thinking and working with leaders on change management for the teams, in order to ensure that we can reduce the frustration that can come along with more people and more complexity.

An equally exciting part of the job is that there are always new challenges. In each market, we constantly encounter new situations, such as changes in taxation rules, changes in customer expectations, fluctuation in cancellation/fail rates, and so on. We call these "problem spaces" that we, as product, will dive into and resolve the issues.

We also have new business models that the business teams may want to try out, such as having non-asap orders, venturing into groceries/pickup modules which was something new till recently, or having a new wave of home chefs in Pakistan and Bangladesh. We call these "opportunity spaces"' that we can also dive into and see how we can develop product solutions for them.

Foodpanda APAC operates in 12 different markets, and pandora today serves more than 20 markets (and is still expanding). While each market is unique in its own ways, with different competition and business environments, we always try to find solutions that can be extended to all markets globally.

What do you like most about your job?

I am blessed to be able to have a view of the end-to-end customer experience and journey of our product. We have great teams working to improve on specific journeys, and my role is to help piece together the overall consumer journey.

My team is my biggest motivation! I believe the Product Specialist team is the most diversified centralized group! We have team members in all the markets we operate in, and they are the most wonderful group of people, who care so much about the work they do, and the customers in the market.

Could you summarize your core tasks?

My team's core tasks are to own the hyper localization for the business teams, to improve daily operations, and to drive the development of key business goals that optimize the user's (customers, vendors, internal stakeholders) journey. Essentially we aim to translate tech into business impact.

We have traditionally played a huge role in the product life cycle of pandora, together with the product team. This means driving product guidance together with business and product leadership, and ensuring that we are looking into problem spaces and opportunity spaces that are aligned with the overall company goals. Once a topic is prioritized, we work with the product and tech team to capture the necessary requirements, and more importantly, create development transparency for business teams. Following which, we drive key feature rollouts and optimize time-to-value to roll out of the key features across the APAC region. Rounding this off in the product life cycle, we empower businesses to be self-sufficient when it comes to using the product features that we have built. We want them to be able to make use of the tools self-sufficiently.

What surprises people most about your job/daily tasks?

I think the most surprising thing about my job is that I have, on average, an introductory session with at least one new joiner at Delivery Hero every week!