From 100 to 1100 Tech Talents: How Bukalapak Became the Largest Product Development Company in Indonesia

When I joined Bukalapak three years ago after almost eight years in Europe, there were fewer than 100 employees with tech-focused roles in the entire company, including software engineers, QAs, product managers, product researchers/designers, and data scientists. Back then we may have had only a few products and far fewer customers than we do right now, but we had tons of potential and rapidly growing market opportunities! 🖖🏼

Fast forward to today (January 2019), where Bukalapak now has more than 1100 of the top Indonesian tech talents working in a variety of roles to research, analyze, design, innovate, develop, and capture the opportunities that will help the needs of our ever-expanding population of amazing customers.

Tech talents now accounts for nearly half of the total employees of Bukalapak. Among us are more than 100 former Indonesian diasporas, fellow Indonesians who used to work or study in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and a dozen other countries, who now returned to Indonesia and driving real empowerment to millions of Indonesian customers.

Together, we all embrace the Indonesian gotong-royong (mutual collaboration) spirit to improve and grow our existing portfolio of hundreds of tech products and services, ranging from the fields of e-commerce, investments, payments, online-to-offline, logistics, all the way to cutting edge fields such as robotics, IoT, computer vision, and natural language understanding.

An Insider's Story of Growth

The journey from 100 to 1100 is a story of transformative growth, rising expectations, and expanding sets of responsibilities. But, as with most stories of this kind, it did not come without its fair share of challenges including organizational growing pains and complex strategic decisions. At many points, we could have easily buckled under the pressure of both living up to that initial potential as well as facing up to the difficulties of a hyper-competitive marketplace, but we are still here and better than ever.

This story is partly a highlight, and partly an inside story of some of the critical decisions and challenges that we face, and how we managed to overcame them and became the largest product development company in Indonesia's history. I hope by sharing this story, we can help other burgeoning tech companies out there achieve an easier growth path without the need to encounter the same level of growing pains as we did.

Heads up though, this will be a lengthy article, please spare 10-12 minutes if you want to read through all the way to the end. 😊

But.. why do you need that many tech talents in the first place?

One might wonder why we need so many tech-focused employees at Bukalapak in the first place? Are we not "just another e-commerce company"? What are we doing that is so different?

Bukalapak is first and foremost a tech company, founded with the mission of helping as many people in Indonesia as possible by building quality tech products to improve their lives. E-commerce was a natural early focus for our team since we could rapidly reach and improve the livelihood for tens of millions of Indonesians by providing a quality marketplace platform upon which they can buy and sell all manner of goods.

But in the last two years, we started to realize that we can do much more for Indonesia than just e-commerce. We have since expanded beyond traditional e-commerce into more than a dozen other product groups. Nowadays, less than half of tech talents are actually working on the core marketplace experience. Now, don't get me wrong, the marketplace is still taking the lion's share of our tech talents, it's still our bread and butter after all. But alongside marketplace, we also concentrate our efforts into various other product groups, many of which are exploratory in nature and still under stealth modes, so stay tuned for future announcements from us!

Wait, stealth modes?

Yes, we have several product groups currently in stealth modes. They are hidden from outside exposure until we are sure that the product they're building can deliver the kind of impact we want to see for our customers. We are not in the habit of over-promising and under-delivering. 😎

One particular example, we recently unveiled one major product group that has been in stealth mode for the past couple of years. The O2O (online-to-offline) group, empowered with the mission of helping millions of under-served warungs (mom-and-pop stores ubiquitous in Indonesia's suburban and rural areas) in modernizing their operations and helping to bridge them with the increasingly tech-savvy consumer base, had spent many months operating as a startup-within-a-startup by iterating and pivoting to find just the right product-market fit.

Here was one of the earliest iteration of the product, where we offered our platform as a way for warungs to earn commissions by selling Bukalapak's marketplace products at their store. Back then it was literally just a form which adds an extra field in the checkout page, the very definition of a minimum viable product:

Over the years, the O2O group kept on experimenting and listening to the needs of the warungs and pivoted our focus multiple times to ensure that our product is delivering the best impact and empowerment to our warung customers. The product slowly gains traction and organic growth. By the time we unveiled it to the public, the Mitra Bukalapak product had caught everyone else off guard for already having half million warungs as its customers and empowering more than 800 billion IDR of monthly income to millions of people throughout Indonesia.

So after two years worth of iterations and pivots, here is how the product looks like nowadays:

They surely have come a long way in two short years! 👏🏼 These kinds of relentless iterations are the essence of product developments, we need to continuously listen to our customers so that we can help them even better than before.

Going Beyond E-Commerce; Doing More for Indonesia

Our O2O effort showcases how Bukalapak’s growth, customer base, and product development expertise enable us to do more to empower Indonesia beyond traditional e-commerce. I had met people who thought that all they need to build successful tech products are just capital and business connections. We've been in the field long enough to know that capital and connections won't get us far unless we also double down on the following three key strengths of Bukalapak: culture, platform, and talents.

Laying down the Foundation: Building the Right Tech Culture

I personally believe being able to lay the right tech culture for Bukalapak since early on means a difference between growing to where we are right now vs. crashing down years ago. We have spent years developing and refining the culture at Bukalapak from the bottom up, fusing together the tech cultures from all over the world that we absorbed through our former diaspora talents, with the Indonesian culture that will always be at the core of our heart and mind.

Whereas a lot of tech startups in Indonesia aspire to emulate the Silicon Valley culture for their company fully, we made a conscious decision to take a step back and leverage the diversity we have in the form of our former diaspora talents from all over the world as our strength and source of inspirations. We recognize that while the Silicon Valley culture carries with it good habits of openness, customer obsession, and going to the extra mile, it also tends to bring a culture where 60+ hours of overwork and hustling at all costs becomes the norm. 😬

So we seek to take the good parts of the Silicon Valley culture and blend it with other cultures that we absorb through Indonesian talents coming from all over the world. For example, we also take inspirations from the European culture of equal freedom and responsible self-organization, including the freedom to pursue a healthy work-life balance and the responsibility to uphold the significant degrees of trust being given to us by the company.

Nothing demonstrates this better than the freedom we gave for more than a dozen of our tech talents, especially for working moms, to work entirely remotely from their homes due to reasons such as the need to take care of their family members. You can see the example of this on timestamp 00:18 at the following video:

For the Indonesian culture itself, we adopt as one of our core pillars the Indonesian culture of gotong-royong (mutual collaborations) through shouldering any burden together as a family, having each other's back, and focusing on learning together instead of pointing fingers and finding whom to blame when issues happen. This also means that we consider business, product, engineering, marketing, etc, as peers to each other that gotong-royong to achieve a mutual goal instead of rigid top-down hierarchies commonly found in other Indonesian companies.

I can go on at length to talk about how the culture at Bukalapak as a tech company is, but I think the best way to share you about this would be to show you the following video that we made about our five cultural pillars:

One of the strongest demonstrations of our culture that drives us to be the largest product development company in Indonesia is the culture of Customer Obsession. We believe that our eagerness to hear and understand what our customers need, our obsessions over listening to the pain points that they have, and our perseverance in delivering tech products that not only eliminate those pain points but also spark joy to our customers, is one of the key strengths that sets us apart.

Developing Versatile Tech Platforms

We have spent millions of person-hours building and evolving a tech platform from grounds up that can serve our massive 50-million customer base and scalable enough to handle hundreds of millions more. Yet, when talking about tech platforms, I'm not only talking about the capacity to serve that many customers, but also the capability to support 1100+ tech talents in effectively building, experimenting, and delivering improvements for our hundreds of tech products and services.

The platform has helped us to evolve and deliver increasingly better experience to our users. But 2018 saw the largest improvements ever. That year alone, our tech platform has delivered more than 8000 product improvements and features to our customers, including more than 1000 improvements in our Android/iOS apps and more than 600 product experiments (e.g., A/B tests) for our data team to analyze and gain insights that can drive our products forward. Being able to support such massively parallel development is a strong testament to the versatility of the tech platforms at Bukalapak, enabling us to iterate and improve the livelihood for millions of Indonesians rapidly.

Most Important of All: Building Top Tech Talents

I cannot underscore enough the importance of building strong tech talents for Bukalapak. More than 99% of tech talents that applied to Bukalapak failed our stringent selection process. Our hiring bar also remains consistently high since our founding because all of our founders are CS graduates that understand well the pitfalls of compromising the hiring of tech talents to a tech company.

One common thread behind our tech talents hiring is our belief that tech talents are the key driving force behind our growth, whereas we understand that in some other companies they are considered as cost factors that should be minimized with. This is the primary reason why we keep on hiring and scaling up our tech teams, not because we are focusing on quantity over quality, but rather because there are so many opportunities and product ideas that we want to explore and build for Indonesia.

We also feel honored that more than a hundred former Indonesian diasporas from all over the world put their trust at Bukalapak and decided to return home to Indonesia for good to join our family. Many of these former diasporas decided to pick Bukalapak over many other competitive choices due to our tech culture and an honest opportunity to make a difference for millions of Indonesians.

Delivering Empowerment and Making a Difference

That last part about making a difference really resonates a lot with the tech talents at Bukalapak, not just the former diasporas. Many of them joined us from other major tech companies because they feel that we are serious with our mission of empowering Indonesia with tech.

Also, since our strategy is to do tons of parallel product developments, our 1100+ tech talents are spread over more than 100 small teams, each of them empowered with high degrees of independence and initiatives.

As an example, we have a small team of 10 tech talents building AI-driven products that are generating 1 Trillion IDR of additional revenue for millions of sellers all over Indonesia.

For another example, we have an even smaller team of 8 tech talents, including one Ph.D. data scientist, designed and executed an experiment by their own initiative, and generates a similar amount of impact through just several months worth of product experiments.

Those examples are common throughout Bukalapak. We believe that small teams of tech talents can make huge amount of impact if we give them the right amount of freedom, trust, and supports. Being able to make a difference like this plays a large role towards our tech talents retention and hiring, and we are happy that we can provide an environment for them to flourish.

Bucking the Trend - Why We Don't Feel the Need to Open a Tech Center Overseas

At this point, it is clear that tech talents play a critical role at Bukalapak's growth and ability to deliver positive impacts to Indonesia. A common question we often heard is, if the demand for tech talents and the role that they play at Bukalapak are that critical, then why did we not follow the trend within all the other Indonesian unicorns (and several other major Indonesian tech product companies) in establishing significant parts of their tech teams overseas?

Instead, we decided to build our second R&D center in Bandung, an Indonesian city with a vibrant and flourishing startup ecosystem located about 150 km to the southeast of Jakarta. So far our plans are to double down in opening more regional R&D centers across Indonesia. In February 2019 we will also launch two more R&D centers in Surabaya and Medan, with a Yogyakarta R&D center launching later this year.

But why did we choose to expand to those four cities instead?

There is one thing in common among them. Three years ago, we launched a nationwide programming competition for students living there. On the surface, it seems evident that the goal was to tap for promising young tech talents and invite them to join our company. Behind the scene, the purpose was actually to collect data points regarding the quality of the talent pool in those cities, as part of our long-term preparation to hire 1000+ tech talents within three years.

Yes, we're willing to invest three years in advance to find the best tech talents for Indonesia. When talking about investing for our talents, we're always playing the long game. They're just that valuable for us.

What this strategy means is that, so far, we are able and willing to spend extra efforts in finding quality tech talents all over Indonesia (and Indonesians across the globe!) and invite them to make a difference for Indonesia together with us. Whereas we understand that other Indonesian unicorns prefer a quicker route by tapping into the experienced tech talent pools that are available overseas.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with their strategy. We are deeply familiar ourselves with the pressing need to scale up quickly and attract top talents to compete against local and international tech companies. In some cases, we also understand that the pressure on those companies can be so critical that the company has no other viable option than to urgently outsource their tech teams, lest they lose their growth momentum and crashed spectacularly.

However, what I personally dislike is the notion circulating around that the reason why those companies decided to outsource significant parts (and in some cases even the majority) of their tech team to other countries is due to the lack of skilled tech talents right here in Indonesia. This carries the implication that Indonesian tech talents are second-rate or don't hold a candle to tech talents abroad!

Bukalapak is a living proof that such a notion is simply untrue. We have always believed that there are a lot of highly qualified Indonesian tech talents all over the world and in other Indonesian cities outside Jakarta, it just sometimes takes an extra amount of effort to find them so that we can extend an invitation for them to join the company.

Thanks to our carefully planned talent growth strategies, our stringent hiring criteria, and our culture of personal growth and mutual learning, so far we are able to source and build top talents right here at home without ever feeling the need to establish overseas tech teams, even though we frequently encounter rapid growth spurts to the tune of nearly doubling our transactions month-on-month.

It should also be said that there are clear benefits in establishing strong tech teams in Indonesia, not the least of which is that it makes the distance between our tech talents and our customers to be virtually nonexistent. They are directly exposed to the needs of their communities, they can see the behaviors of their families and friends in using our products, and they can talk about their individual use cases. This is something that we won't have if we follow the trend in building our tech team overseas, and this creates a strong and direct path from the customers to the people who are developing the product!

While Also Welcoming with Open Hands Any Tech Talents to Move to Indonesia

All these strategies do not mean that we have an aversion to hiring non-Indonesians, or that other nationalities are somehow less talented or capable. We seek the best tech talents for Indonesia, regardless of their nationality, race, creed, or gender. We also understand that one of the most substantial assets that these talents bring to Bukalapak is their diverse and rich experience with world-class companies, which is why we also have plenty of ex-diaspora and expatriate talents from Amazon, Google, Uber, Rakuten, Shopify, and many others.

Our strategy is to bring together these talented groups of people to Indonesia, each with their own unique life experience so that together we can foster a robust learning and mentoring culture, where everyone can share and learn from each other.

So, What's Next for Bukalapak?

This was a glimpse to some of the decisions and challenges we faced in the past three years as Bukalapak scaled up from 100 to 1100 tech talents. It has been a wild yet immensely enjoyable ride, something that seems to be shared by our tech talents when taking into consideration that the turnover rate among them is less than 1.5%, or about ten times better than the industry average.

We will keep on growing, and we will keep on exploring other ideas to deliver more empowerment to millions of Indonesians and improve their livelihood. We hope that we can take the hard-earned experience from developing our core e-commerce platform and invest them into building even better families of products, services, and experiences that reach more and more Indonesians and continue to bring joy to their lives through technology.

And who knows, maybe someday we can also spark joy to others outside Indonesia!