Agoda

Elevating the voice of design inside one of Asia's most data-driven product organisations.

Agoda operates at a scale where small design decisions have enormous downstream impact. Tens of millions of users, a product spanning search, booking, payments, and loyalty across multiple verticals, and a culture that runs on experimentation and conversion metrics. The design organisation was 70+ people across 11 product domains with 6 design managers, but the leadership structure needed strengthening. Design managers were overwhelmed with operations and people management, leaving too little time for strategy, craft, and quality. Design was seen as execution for product strategy, how it looks rather than how it works. The voice of design needed to be louder, and it needed to be louder at every level.

I joined as Director of Product Design, co-leading the design organisation alongside another Director. We split by product domains: I owned Search, Booking, Accommodations, Design Systems, Accessibility, and DesignOps. They owned Customer Experience Centres, Back-end Platform, Travel Platform (Flights), Loyalty, and Travel Assistant. Together we were responsible for design quality, team development, and design's strategic influence across the business.

The first priority was unifying the leadership layer. The 6 existing design managers were strong practitioners but isolated in their domains, running operations without enough time for cross-domain strategy or quality standards. Alongside the other Director, we created a new role of Product Design Lead (a manager-level position) and built a professional development programme to coach and grow the next generation of leaders from within the team. The hiring bar for external managers focused on three elements: craft and quality obsession, agile leadership suited to fast-paced environments, and a genuine focus on people development. If we wanted to elevate the voice of design, it needed to happen at every level, from junior designers through to us as Directors.

The most challenging domain I owned was the design system. Not because of the components or the tokens, but because of broken relationships. The design system team had poor connectivity with the rest of the design org, which is a challenging position for a system that should be about empowerment and efficiency. Inconsistent application of the system in the front-end was also creating accessibility issues, which linked directly to the a11y initiative. Rebuilding trust between the system team and the product teams consuming the system was as much a leadership problem as a design one. I focused on contribution models, shared governance, and making it easier for product teams to adopt the system correctly rather than work around it.

Agoda's culture runs on experimentation. Every design change goes through an A/B experiment before permanent deployment. I believe in this method, and I adopted a similar continuous improvement approach at British Airways through unmoderated studies. But the experiment-heavy culture created a specific problem for the design system: every DS change also had to go through a live experiment, which hugely damaged the speed of the DS team and ultimately the perception of the system to the rest of design. Navigating that tension, respecting the experiment culture while advocating for the system's need to move faster, was one of the more nuanced leadership challenges of the role.