Grab Indonesia & Business Agility During COVID-19 by Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT

C ASE STUDY AUGUST 2021

GRAB INDONESIA & BUSINESS AGILITY DURING COVID-19 REGIE MAURICIO, JULIA TURNBULL, AND DINA H. SHERIF

I N T RO D U C T I O N

ON MARCH 2, 2020, PRESIDENT JOKO WIDODO CONFIRMED THE FIRST TWO CASES OF COVID-19 IN INDONESIA.

By April 10, 2020, there were 3,512 confirmed cases in the country. In response, the Indonesian government announced large-scale physical distancing measures, including restrictions on transportation.¹ For Grab, the Southeast Asian super app,² these regulations would have a direct impact on the livelihoods of its many driverpartners in Indonesia. Ridzki Kramadibrata, Grab Indonesia’s President, had to think fast. Ridzki has been with Grab since its early days and has seen the company’s transformation from a singlestory office where it registered its first drivers to becoming Grab’s largest market. He was no stranger to Grab’s ability to adapt to its changing market rapidly, but the company had never faced a challenge at the scale of a pandemic. Ridzki understood the importance of preserving public health and adopting the government’s restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19. He wanted to find a solution that would not compromise health while ensuring its driver- and merchant-partners’ livelihoods. Due to Grab’s agile culture, Ridzki assembled a new team to find a solution. By June, Grab launched “GrabProtect.” In addition to implementing strict health attestations, masking, and disinfecting procedures, Grab equipped cars with partitions ¹https://en.tempo.co/read/1330115/psbb-jakarta-gojekgrab-scrape-ojek-service

2 Grab Indonesia

to limit exposure between drivers and passengers. Grab provided motorbike drivers a shield that the driver would wear like a backpack to restrict airflow from driver to passenger. Grab worked closely with the government to approve these procedures, which allowed thousands of Grab’s drivers to get back on the road. From its foundation, Grab was built to adapt quickly to a changing environment. In its eight years of operation, the company has expanded to eight countries and hosts 19 active verticals. As a super app, Grab is continually developing and adding to a product offering that currently includes ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, financial services, and telehealth products. Agility is a core component of Grab’s business model to support the diverse host of problems that the company faces daily. Business agility is the ability to stay relevant and resilient in a continually changing market. Grab’s ambition to serve many markets over many verticals is difficult and will continue to bring new challenges. As the company grows, Ridzki must find a way to balance institutional structure and its continuous need to change. This case study explores how Grab is able to build and sustain a culture of agility and respond to its ever-changing environment. ²

https://en.tempo.co/read/1330115/psbb-jakarta-gojek-grab-scrape-ojekservice “Super apps” are platforms developed by a company to house many different services. Offerings can be diverse and include messaging, mobile banking, ride-sharing, delivery, and other features.

II. GRAB AND INDONESIAN CONTEXT

T H E C O M PA N Y ’S V I S I O N I S T H AT C U S TO M E R S U S E T H E APP FROM THE M O M E N T T H E Y WA K E U P TO T H E M O M E N T T H E Y G O TO S L E E P AS G R A B B R I N G S YO U TO AND FROM WORK, D E L I V E R S YO U R M E A L S , A N D TA K E S C A R E O F YO U R B I L L S .

In 2011, Harvard MBA classmates Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling entered a business plan competition with a mobile app concept that would connect passengers directly with taxi drivers. They were runners-up in the competition, but the Malaysian cofounders realized the value of their idea in markets with insufficient public transportation where people rely on taxis and motorbikes for employment and transportation daily.¹ Grab was founded as a mission-driven company that provides income-generating opportunities for drivers and safe transportation for passengers across Southeast Asia (SEA). While the company built its ride-hailing services, it witnessed other user problems, including access to financial services. Grab quickly realized that it could play a more significant role in the SEA market. Over the past eight years, as the company grew, its mission expanded from ride-hailing to building a digital ecosystem that aims to “improve the lives of Southeast Asians.” The company currently offers 19 verticals in transportation, logistics, financial services, and travel (Annex I). The company is working to develop the app so that customers will reach for it from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. Grab also brings customers to and from work, delivers meals, and takes care of their bills. The community around Grab includes consumers, drivers, merchants, and enterprises.

¹Ben Bland, Financial Times, “Southeast Asia’s Answer to Uber,” 2014 June 24 https://www.ft.com/content/dbe630f2-f61b-11e3-a038-00144feabdc0 Accessed December 8, 2020

Grab Indonesia 3

GRAB INDONESIA (ID) Ridzki is responsible for one of Grab’s most important markets: Indonesia. In 2016, Grab Indonesia (ID) was an app service operating in a small office in Indonesia where staff connected passengers with drivers, and motorbike drivers awaited ride requests. By late 2019, Grab was operating in eight countries in SEA. In Indonesia alone, Grab was operating in more than 250 cities by 2020. Grab ID also plays a vital role as the company’s incubator. Indonesia has a population of approximately 270 million and 17,000 islands. Indonesians speak many local languages in addition to the national language. For this reason, Ridzki’s teams are often approached to oversee the test sites for launching new products and localizing them for various market sizes relative to their levels of technology adoption. In addition to the country’s ideal testing conditions, one of Ridzki’s early priorities were to work with Indonesia’s public agencies to enable technology-driven economic growth. He and Grab’s public relations team have worked to build this relationship over the past five years. In the beginning, government ministries rebuffed Ridzki and his team as instigators disrupting incumbent transportation industries. Grab is now a

4 Grab Indonesia

partner of choice in MSME capacity building programs and COVID-19 task forces for the Indonesian government. Moreover, the government has adopted policies that incentivize technology initiatives and sees the private sector as a partner in building the digital infrastructure that enables future growth. The success of products and government initiatives in Indonesia is a good indicator of their success in Grab’s other markets. Grab ID’s success is not without its challenges. As Ridzki pushes his teams to capture more of the Indonesian market, competitors are right there with them. Uber has been aggressively expanding in SEA since 2013. However, as Grab grew in prominence and demonstrated a better productmarket fit, Uber sold its Southeast Asian assets to Grab and acquired a 27.5% stake in the company in 2018. Competition with Gojek, another super app, has also pushed the company into a price war and aggressive expansion plans across Indonesia. In Ridzki’s first year at Grab, he challenged his team to expand operations into 100 cities in 1 year. They delivered 103 cities. This continued competition pushes Grab ID to quickly adapt and continually evolve.

I I I . G R A B P R OT E C T

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ridzki’s team was already wellversed in adapting to competitive environments. The team communicated quickly to conceptualize a solution, build a prototype, test it with users, and deploy it across a fragmented country.

Within a month of the ban on online ride-hailing, Ridzki and his team had implemented GrabCar Protect in close coordination with the Ministry of Transportation. The new initiative packaged masking, frequent sanitation, separation screens between drivers and passengers, and penalty-free cancellations as a premium service to get Grab ID’s four-wheel vehicles back on the road.

The pandemic meant that fewer commuters were traveling to their offices, and fewer passengers were requesting rides to visit family and friends. Moreover, on April 10, 2020, Indonesia’s government implemented guidelines for cities to impose lockdowns and quarantines as physical distancing measures were inadequate to contain transmission of COVID-19. Stay-at-home orders and bans on online ride-hailing made using Grab’s transportation services illegal. This sudden drop in business posed harsh consequences for the company and its drivers. Committed to getting back on the road, Ridzki set out to meet two objectives:

But GrabCar Protect was only a small part of Grab’s fleet. Two-wheel transportation is more significant in Indonesia for its affordability, ubiquity, and maneuverability across different road conditions and traffic. Ridzki knew that getting GrabBike back on the road would be more challenging. In April, Grabbers were working remotely and relied upon video calls and online communication to share ideas. GrabBike Protect became a universal priority. The Grab ID team had buy-in from the co-founders and central management to redeploy resources to solve the challenge of increasing demand for rides and 2-wheel drivers.

Preserve drivers’ incomes.

Make passengers feel safe riding on motor bikes and in cars.

⁴https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/03/27/indonesia-to-issue-lock-

down-regulation-as-covid-19-cases-continue-to-soar.html, Accessed December 11, 2020.

Grab Indonesia 5

Observation –

Hypothesis –

Experiment –

At the beginning of the ban of online

Ridzki and his team tested many different

Based on the mock-up of the wings,

ride-hailing, Ridzki charged his teams

hypotheses, some of which made it to

early versions were manufactured by

with data collection on the pain points

market. This period’s successes included

product development teams in Grab

for GrabBike drivers, agents, merchants,

the dividers, sanitation procedures, and

ID’s country office in Jakarta and sent

customers, and government agencies.

passenger health attestations that charac-

to territory managers who tested them

Grab ID mobilized its social media chan-

terized GrabCar Protect.

with drivers. The country office decided

2 months

nels to get in touch with its partners and users and organized focus groups to gather more in-depth insights. Ridzki and the public affairs teams also contacted government contacts to stay apprised of policies that would further affect their

1 month

However, replicating the same experience on Grab’s motorbikes was more complicated. Riders and passengers are closer together and could easily expose one another to the virus. Stumped by the

business.

lack of physical distancing while riding a

From these feedback efforts, the team

from outside of product development to

found that safety was the primary

pitch their suggestions.

concern of most stakeholders, followed by preserving drivers’ livelihoods. It was important that customers felt that they would reasonably not be at risk of exposure while using bike services. Team members observed that, unlike GrabCar, passengers feel more exposed while using GrabBike and were worried about their risk of contracting COVID-19.

motorbike, Ridzki invited team members

One of these suggestions was from Neneng Goenadi, Grab ID Managing Director, who had an idea for creating wings for 2-wheel drivers to wear on their backs. These plastic shields mimicked wings and created a barrier between the driver and passenger. Not only would these shields reduce the airflow and risk of exposure between driver and passenger, but they would also signal that the service experience had changed with the changing times. The team decided that the solution was worth a shot, and within four days, the team built a mock-up that drivers could wear on their backs.

6 Grab Indonesia

3 weeks (concurrent)

to test the wings in 11 different cities where lockdown measures had yet to take effect. Territory managers were able to recruit drivers through social media and blast messages in WhatsApp groups. Drivers were accustomed to local Grab teams asking for their feedback via phone or focus group discussions; therefore, soliciting beta-testers was no different. Typically, testing of new products would take place in Jakarta, where user density quickly produces robust data sets for analysis and refining. However, the product development team hoped that the spread of experiments could approximate use cases should the wings be implemented nationally. The territory managers responsible for each city collected data from both drivers and passengers on several factors, including hygiene, safety, and maneuverability. They sent these insights back to the country office, which would monitor the experiment’s progress for the next three weeks.

Analyze and Iterate –

Scale

3 weeks (concurrent)

Throughout May, local teams gathered input from drivers on what was and wasn’t working with the shields. Through carefully managed communications channels with drivers, local territory managers collected feedback from drivers wearing the shields. User feedback showed a significant deal of variation as drivers had different reactions in different cities. One critical factor was how different communities perceived the severity of COVID-19. Some areas were more worried about the pandemic than others, and Grab had to certify that its new products would reassure even the more risk-averse consumer. Ridzki and the Public Affairs team worked with the Ministry of Transportation and the Jakarta Transportation Office to ensure that the wings met the government’s COVID-19 guidelines. The team shared its findings with the government, who then worked with Grab to refine the design of the wings and its implementation strategy.

By the end of June 2020, Ridzki and the product development team presented the wings to the Director General of Land Transportation and the Ministry of Transportation. Within a few days, Grab began shield distribution in cities that allowed 2-wheel passenger rides. Hyperlocal team members set up distribution points, and Grab ID’s rapid product development process successfully deployed a shield that kept passengers and drivers safe. Ridzki and his team’s agile thinking was able to re-operationalize Grab ID’s entire fleet a month and a half of the implementation of government restrictions. In fact, Grab ID was able to onboard thousands of driver-partners to support Grab’s other verticals, such as food delivery, grocery delivery, and social selling, which further supplemented the drivers’ livelihoods. These verticals also created opportunities to bring thousands of informal, in-person businesses online during strict physical distancing measures.

Grab Indonesia 7

GRAB PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE 2 MONTHS

OBSERVATION STEP 1 (2 MONTHS)

Grab continuously gathers feedback from internal and external channels. Teams prioritize issues and select certain problems for closer observation.

HYPOTHESIS STEP 2 (1 DAY) Team members across Grab hypothesize solutions to address the problem based on their in-depth observation.

EXPERIMENT STEP 3 (3 WEEKS) The product development team designs an experiment to test the hypothesis in a limited area of operation.

ANALYZE & ITERATE STEP 4 (3 WEEKS) The product development team and local teams collect and analyze data. Developers iterate a cycle of hypotheses, experiments, and analysis to refine the solution.

EE K

3 WEEKS

SCALE STEP 5 The finalized product is scaled across areas of operation. Internal and external feedback is fed into Step 1.

GrabBike Protect illustrates Grab ID’s ability to quickly align resources and stakeholder relationships to ensure its platform is inclusive and essential in SEA. The company also adapted to the pandemic conditions through its innovations in GrabMart, GrabFood, and geofencing.

GrabMart Grab scaled GrabMart across eight countries in under two months, allowing Grab to introduce a wider range of businesses onto its platform, such as wet market sellers, mom-and-pop shops, and florists. Across GrabMart and GrabFood, more than half a million new merchant partners joined Grab’s platform in 2020. Merchant-partners averaged a 21% increase in online revenue after joining Grab. GrabMart has been successful in Jakarta. Merchants can sign up online or through the app and upload their store catalogs. Grab customers make their selections on GrabMart. When the order is ready, a delivery driver receives a notification to collect and take it to the delivery address. Going beyond driver engagement, GrabMart accelerated the platform’s opening to a new group of partners and has become a gateway for traditional in-person retailers to reach customers online. Both formal and informal merchants can use the app, thus accelerating the digitization of local ecosystems. Grab has the capacity to serve chain retailers in urban areas as well as mom-and-pop stores. Rudy Salahuddin, Deputy of Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs recognized Grab’s effort to support the government’s digitalization agenda. “They are able to encourage the use of digital technology, especially for MSME and driver-partners.” he said. Financials •

Competitive service in its evolution as a super app

•

Supported the growth of the company during a recession

Customers: •

Gained access to essential goods during a time of strict lockdowns

Platform: •

Additional merchant-partners have expanded Grab’s scope in all eight countries.

People: •

Launching GrabMart in five new markets in a short timeframe engaged teams to develop and implement merchant onboarding procedures.

As Grab looks to the post-COVID-19 economy, its capacity to support merchants and delivery drivers and become an essential service in Grab users’ daily lives will be integral to sustaining an inclusive economy.

10 Grab Indonesia

GrabFood

Grab acquired Uber in SEA in Q3 of 2018. Grab and Uber shared investors, and Uber did not see a pathway to sustainability in SEA. Along with the ride-hailing, Grab acquired UberEats which became the foundation for GrabFood. As local stay-at-home orders persisted throughout the pandemic, GrabFood became even more critical for delivery drivers, restaurants, and consumers. Throughout the pandemic, the Grab team has continued introducing new technologies in features that enhanced efficiency on the platform. Grab ID batches orders so that drivers can collect multiple orders from a vendor or numerous nearby vendors and deliver them to recipients in nearby destinations. The ability to quickly deploy a new technology allows for faster development of follow-on products. How is GrabFood meeting the objectives and key results? Financials: •

Hyperlocal and essential for Grab’s competitive growth strategy

Customers: •

Order from local restaurants and stay safe.

Platform: •

Restaurants have seen a 21% increase in online orders

People: •

Grabbers work together to integrate new technologies into existing products based on partner feedback.

Grab Indonesia 11

Geofencing Protecting the livelihoods for drivers is a priority for the national government, and Jodi Mahardi, the Special Staff and Spokesperson to the Coordinating Minister of Maritime and Investment Affairs, noted how Grab has a “strong contribution to the welfare of the people.” To support public health measures, especially in the greater Jakarta area, Grab ID worked with the city government to introduce a feature that prevents drivers from congregating closely in large groups. Drivers tend to wait in strategic locations for requests for deliveries and passenger rides. This tendency raised public officials’ concerns that the virus could spread quickly between drivers who could transmit it to others. Grab ID has actively managed its relationship with Jakarta’s governor to safely get 2-wheel drivers back on the road. Notably, Grab introduced a geofencing technology that alerts drivers when they are less than a one-meter distance from each other, using data captured from their phones. Grab ID launched this feature in September 2020 in Jakarta with plans to use the technology in other markets. Each notification sent to two or more drivers is estimated to prevent 24-171 additional COVID-19 infections. Anies Baswedan, Governor of Jakarta, praised Grab for using technology to maintain driver safety and physical distancing protocols throughout the city. This fix has allowed drivers to adapt to changes in user behavior—where and when they are traveling and requesting deliveries—and has supported local officials’ efforts to reopen cities while keeping people safe. How is geofencing contributing to Grab’s objectives and key results? Financials: •

Ensures no regulatory hurdle that leads to business disruption.

Customers: •

Feel safe knowing that drivers cannot assemble in groups before giving passengers rides and making deliveries.

Platform: •

Keeps driver-partners safe from virus infection spread.

People: •

12 Grab Indonesia

Grabbers are building solutions that contribute to creating a platform to safely support all partners and collaborate with the government.

I V. AG I L I T Y E N A B L E R S

DRIVING CULTURES Ridzki encourages his team to “Always think big and prepare for a bigger achievement.” Grab ID can be agile because it is mission-driven, feedback-sensitive, and free to fail. Ridzki has mainstreamed these values in his leadership as well as the institutional culture of Grab across the region. These values enable Grabbers to tackle novel problems with innovative solutions.

Mission-Driven Culture

Acting on Feedback

Ridzki left his previous job as COO at AirAsia because he wanted his work to have a deeper impact on SEA. Most Grabbers share this motivation. In terms of “mission-driven culture,” 65% of Grabbers interviewed noted that they joined the company because they want to “serve the people of Southeast Asia” by solving the everyday transportation, payment, and logistics issues. Most employees identify as being from the region, and the minority of those not from SEA have established residency or lived in the region prior to joining Grab. Employees report that their connection to the region’s challenges and opportunities makes them work harder.

Feedback is core to Grab’s user-centric approach. Ridzki emphasizes the importance of placing the user’s needs first. The company continually collects feedback from users through the mobile app, call centers, and social media. They also host in-person focus groups with users to generate more in-depth insights. In part, the feedback they receive is unsolicited and generated as users encounter an issue when using the platform. However, Grab also regularly pushes driver check-ins, publishes surveys, organizes focus group discussions, and contracts with thirdparties to gather feedback from its drivers and users. Through these proactive exercises, Grab is able to anticipate challenges and evaluate the effectiveness of specific hypotheses and beta solutions that the company is developing. Most importantly, these sessions are vital to eliminating noise and making sense of unsolicited data sets that allow Grab to distill insights into action points.

Grab Indonesia 13

Freedom to Fail

“A LWAYS T H I N K B I G A N D P R E PA R E F O R A B I G G E R AC H I E V E M E N T.” - R I DZ K I K R A M A D I B R ATA

P R E S I D E N T, G R A B I N D O N E S I A

Ridzki and his team’s mission of improving Southeast Asian lives is a lofty goal. Grab will not be the first to attempt to address the region’s infrastructure and employment issues. Persistent challenges require new solutions, and Grab has allowed itself the latitude to experiment and fail. Russel Cohen, Managing Director of Operations, said that “Grab is a creative culture and very understanding of experimentation.” Jerald Singh, Grab’s Regional Chief Product Officer, said that the company bases its problem-solving process on the scientific method. After teams observe an issue on the platform, they develop a hypothesis on what changes they can implement to solve the problem. Grabbers set up an experiment, analyze the results, and repeat the process as necessary to achieve the target outcome. This process is not centralized. Local, national, and regional teams can solve problems independently or with other groups depending on the issue. As teams attempt to solve issues in different ways, there are many failures for every success. Demi Yu, Regional Head of GrabFood and GrabMart, said that “out of many experiments we run, 80% may not work at the first try. So we have to continually find fixes and improve our offerings.” The following guiding principles provide Grab the right environment to embrace the freedom to fail:

Return on Investment

Singh said that “everything we do is driven by ROI.” In terms of problem-solving, Grab has a high threshold for failure as long as experiments fail fast. To maximize limited resources and adapt quickly, the company pushes teams to solve problems with internal resources before escalating to more resource-intensive solutions. Grabbers hack together early solutions to determine whether features are solving a real pain point for users and how they contribute to profitability before investing additional development time and capital into upgrades.

14 Grab Indonesia

Data

Ridzki also understands that failure is productive as long as teams are learning. Data is the core of how Grab makes decisions and measures its success. The teams’ capacity to record and communicate the results of their experiments contributes to how Grab will approach problems in the future. Data is collected and measured from the product usage of customers and drivers, which helps Grab understand how features and products impact users. Anecdotal data, collected through meetings and surveys, give Grab insights into the user behavior data gathered through the app. Data enables teams to model the profitability of new products and features before they are introduced across markets.

When online ride-hailing was banned in Indonesia, the culture of being free to fail allowed Grab to address a host of issues quickly and creatively. This situation catalyzed a timely solution via GrabBike wings, which were immediately tested, redesigned, and re-tested. The data gathered from stakeholders before and after these trials allowed Grab to refine

the product and produce the solution that allowed Grab’s motorbike drivers to get back on the road. Being mission-driven and free to fail generates a great deal of energy within Grab. The following sections identify how Grab directs these ambitions and fresh ideas into growth for the company.

COLLABORATIVE COMMUNICATION Monthly, company-wide town halls are a cornerstone of institutionalizing collaboration at Grab across the SEA markets. At these monthly meetings, the founders meet with all of Grab’s staff across SEA to deliver critical messages, business updates and answer questions. The townhalls serve the immediate purpose of making announcements and aligning activities as well as a greater purpose of instilling the notion of “one Grab” and leading a culture of collaboration by example. In the Q&A session, all employees can raise concerns or share an insight regardless of their position or seniority. This structure’s underlying message is that all employee input matters and that Grab is stronger through collaboration. This spirit of collaborative communication carries across Grab. Each vertical and region has its own regular meetings, in which the structure is similar to the town halls. Hanief Meinanda, Head of Strategy and Planning for Grab ID, noted that though the company may have grown, communication remains flat.

About half of the interviewees reported that collaborative communication is one reason why Grab is so agile. This platform encourages teams to break silos and share ideas across verticals and regions. This cross-pollination allows the company to “hive-think” through problems as they arise. Through collaborative communication, teams can benefit from the catalog of data and experiments generated throughout the company’s history and build on Grabbers’ successes and failures across SEA. When designing GrabBike protect, the idea for creating wings for drivers did not come from product design teams but from Ridzki encouragement of cross-team feedback, which opened the door for ideas from Neneng, Grab ID’s Managing Director. Management at Grab ID encourages Grabbers to solicit advice across teams. The open communication between teams allowed for quality ideas, regardless of the source, to be taken seriously and tested. By breaking through these functional silos, Grab ID is able to maximize the benefit of its employees’ creativity.

Grab Indonesia 15

INSTITUTIONALIZATION Grab’s culture and communication generate and facilitate a great deal of problem-solving power. Knowing what to prioritize and how to execute a solution is key in a context filled with new challenges at varying scales. Ridzki said, “without process, feedback will go nowhere.” Through Grab’s objectives and key results matrix and frequent restructuring, the company can directly solve its most critical problems

Objectives and Key Results Matrix

Needs-Based Restructuring

The company measures its performance against an objectives and key results (OKR) matrix (Annex II). The OKRs are a set of financial and non-financial metrics set for each vertical and each market. Targets include benchmarks for EBITDA, revenue, customer experience, net promoter score, safety, driver satisfaction, merchant satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and governance. The goals identified for each team are aligned with the priorities set by the Executive Committee and revised approximately every six months.

Grab adapts its organizational structure to fit its needs. In Indonesia alone, the company has reorganized several times to respond to the changing landscape.

Through this tool, Grab’s leadership can set priorities for the company. These parameters direct the efforts of individual problem-solving teams to the company’s strategic mission. The OKRs are set intentionally high. Stephanus Ardianto, a lead on four-wheel operations, said, “These aren’t OKRs. These are aspirations!” However, the logic of unattainable OKRs fits with the company’s culture. The same respondent noted that though teams sometimes do not meet their OKRs, they know they are doing well as long as they are learning through the process. This interviewee said that because communication is so open at Grab, teams are able to share why they may have missed the mark and identify what help they need. Grab has adjusted OKR targets considering the pandemic at both the regional and local levels. These amendments did not make the company less hungry but rather focused on redirecting its resources to securing wins and supporting its partners. With these new metrics, teams could remain focused on a “pathway to profitability” despite the pandemicrelated barriers.

16 Grab Indonesia

Grab ID restructured to make operations “hyperlocal,” thus decentralizing the decision-making process and enabling local teams to fulfill their user base within an appropriate timeframe. The reorganization brought several advantages. First, teams were able to ensure that activities were hyperlocal and tailored to each area of the operation’s specific user and partner base. Because of Indonesia’s geographic fragmentation, demographic diversity, and federated governance, the hyper-local approach freed Grabbers to try different solutions to different problems depending on the context. Second, the reorganization created more time for strategy. Since Grab had grown so aggressively in Indonesia, the company spent much of its resources on customer acquisition. The reorganization makes it possible to dedicate more attention to efforts outside of the daily operations and instead make inroads into Grab’s future. The new structure created more flexibility and time for the company to respond to problems with agility. Grab ID’s restructuring was timely for the pandemic. With this new organizational framework, territory teams were better equipped to implement solutions in the country’s federalized response to COVID-19. Local teams were also more closely connected to the drivers, users, and municipal government officials whose cooperation and feedback were critical to designing and rolling out GrabCar Protect and GrabBike Protect.

V I . LO O K I N G F O R WA R D

Grab’s agility has made the company successful across 19 verticals and eight countries. For future growth, Ridzki must consider how the company will continue to be agile as it scales. Agility comes with trade-offs, including

Building Continuity

Aligning the work of thousands of employees takes time, and each strategic pivot has a learning curve. Teams may not have the luxury of finding a stride and building momentum to accomplish a particular objective before prioritizing a new one. Building trust with consumers also takes time. As the platform adds to and amends its offering, Grab must invest in guaranteeing that its customers continue to have confidence in the services they receive.

Ensuring Quality

Product development is also time-consuming, and the speed of rollouts prioritizes “velocity over quality,” as Singh says. There is little opportunity to take the time to perfect a product before rollout. While all of Grab ID’s innovations have

worked, each product is a draft for continuous improvement.

Retaining Talent

The pace of work at Grab is intense and takes determination. This culture works for some, but not for all. Despite these challenges, an agile company approach is necessary to achieving Grab’s goal of becoming a “super app.” Grab’s vision is the ‘everyday, everything app’ that the people of SEA use to help in their daily lives. Ordering breakfast, getting to work, paying bills, buying groceries, and other quotidian activities can all be done with Grab. The company wants to be the go-to platform for transport, delivery, logistics, financial services, entertainment, social media, and beyond. Agility will continue to be a valuable asset for Grab as it moves into increasingly diverse verticals. Currently, there is an upper limit to how far super apps can expand. It will also likely be the case that other companies in the market have refined a particular service better than Grab. Super apps will have to pick a lane to compete as the market offering becomes more sophisticated.

Grab Indonesia 17

At a macro-level, some respondents were wary of how far super apps could reach in SEA. China, which has distinguished itself as the model for the evolution of super apps, has the distinct advantage of being a market of 1.2 billion people under a generally centralized regulatory framework. However, SEA is much more fragmented politically, demographically, and geographically, and has only half the population of China. Where one super app could capture large portions of the Chinese market, multiple localized approaches would be needed to capture market share across the SEA region. Grab’s hyperlocal strategy has been very successful in this context. According to Euromonitor, Grab is currently the category leader for online food delivery, ride-hailing, and digital wallet payments in the region. Grab’s continued adaptability will be essential to the super app’s durability. Grab’s culture is dynamic, and Ridzki knows that he has a vital role in shaping how the company approaches its future challenges. Grab’s goal is to continue expanding its services and reach further into the SEA region. With its agile culture, Grab hopes it can meet the challenges of the future.

18 Grab Indonesia

W I T H I TS AG I L E C U LT U R E , GRAB HOPES IT CAN MEE T THE CHALLENGES OF THE FUTURE

ANNEX

ANNEX I Grab’s Active Vertical (as per June 2021)

NUMBER

VERTICAL3

NUMBER

VERTICAL3

Transport

Hotels

GrabFood

Attractions

GrabMart

GrabGifts

GrabExpress

Airtime

GrabAssistant

Billpay

GrabPay

GameTop-up

PayLater

Clean&Fix

Loans

Insurance

Autoinvest

GrabRewards

GrabHealth

Grab Indonesia 19

ANNEX II Grab’s Objectives and Key Results (OKR) guide as of September

Performance Category

Objective & Key Result(s)

Financial

Achieve financial goals and reach profitability

Customer

Achieve the perfect customer journey • Safety • Hygiene in all services • Platform stability • Satisfaction

Platform

Retain customers, drivers, and merchant partners during the Covid-19 pandemic recession

People

Maintain high employee engagement: • Passionate • Motivated • Committed • High level of effort

20 Grab Indonesia

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