IDN Chat Vol. 01: Trusting and Empowering to Print Out Innovations

The first volume of IDN Chat was enlivened by the coming of Herman Widjaja as the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Aswin Utomo as the Vice President of Engineering of Tokopedia that discussed “The Innovation Secrets of Tokopedia”. Acknowledging that Tokopedia was basically a compilation of smaller startups―it realized that if they were together, they could shape a more massive entrepreneur. 

Departing from the intention to make a better innovation, Tokopedia knew that Indonesia, said Herman, had a powerful weapon to really execute something new in order to compete globally. It was basically rich in smart and creative human resources. “Let’s just start from something very simple. Companies have interns, yeah? Will you ask them to make you a cup of coffee or to copy your papers because you simply don’t want to do it? We never do that in Tokopedia. Since we only select experienced people (formally and informally), we empower them by giving them tasks to really do something just like our other full-time employees. We accompany them for 3 days, but for the rest of the time, they think of it themselves and it works, anyway. It really always works,” Herman shared. 

“Well, since we’re engineers, we can say that engineers will mostly learn on the jobs they work on. I mean, we’ve only got basic concepts of engineering in college, nothing more. However, when we practically do the tasks, there are really a lot of things we can find out after really doing the job itself. You engineers here can relate, stack overflow right away to figure out the bug you’re facing, huh?” said Aswin. The development of technology, for him, was very exciting that it could never stop. To keep on following the latest technology would be another success-key as well. 

Focusing on the customers and merchants was really that one goal that Tokopedia would focus on as always. Our intention to help them could keep on stimulating us to create features helping them to solve their problems. “Remember, getting customers is hard, but maintaining customers is even harder. Treat them so much well, make them stay,” they said.