Days at Kargo Season 1

March 2, 2019

It’s finally the time to write this. I don’t know what will I write here but I will try my best to explain how great Kargo is.

Kargo is the first company that made me understand how to work in a startup. Well actually Kargo is not a pure startup because Kargo was already built on 2012 as Kargo.co.id and then Kargo rebranded into Kargo.tech since last year. The employees were mostly from Uber and Grab so some of them might already knew each other for a long time. I was offered to be an UI/UX designer because there wasn’t any UI/UX designer in Kargo. Even the Product team itself only consisted Rangga as the product manager and me as the noob. But later, in the middle of this season I met Meta, who joined as the junior product designer. Since then I also changed my habit to use “product designer intern” as my title. Because there were only me and Meta who worked in the same field, we often talked literally every time. We were also sitting in the same table side by side. I worked on Kargo Internal Dashboard designs and Meta worked on coordinating with Paperpillar team. Paperpillar was like an agency but we used the team for working on designs. Before Meta joined, Paperpillar helped me on designing Kargo products. Kargo had three products to design and code at the same time, there were Internal Dashboard, Transporter App, and Shipper Web. At first, I was ordered to design for all of the three products but later Paperpillar handled on Transporter App and Shipper Web designs so I only had to focus on Internal Dashboard.

When I was joined for the first time, the office room was only one. All of the team divisions were in the same room so it was easy to befriend with the whole Kargo employees. Time by time, we were separated into three rooms: one for operations team, one for product and engineering team, and the last one was for GA, HR, and finance team. Since I worked in the product and engineering team’s room, I became closer with them as well. One of my notable friendly employees I really like was Maggie. When she came for the first time and introduced herself, I was happy because she said that she lived in the same neighborhood like me. She was very humble even though she had worked in Facebook before. Yes, the real Facebook company in US.

As part of Rangga’s team, I also respected him a lot. In Kargo, there were lots of employees who graduated from overseas universities. As far as I knew, he only graduated from University of Indonesia and he already got a good reputation. He once worked in Grab. He even had his own startup, although I didn’t know if his startup was still available or not. I could feel why he was chosen as a product manager in Kargo. He was very diligent and he even wanted to learn how to design. I envied him a lot but at the same time I wanted to have personalities and skills like him.

I couldn’t mention all of the employees one by one, I liked Mr. Endru who joined as an Android developer in the same time like me, I liked Bagas, Zidna, Jais, and many more from the engineering team. I adored Cynthia and Ino from operations team. I respected Mr. Mario who offered me this chance and Ms. Ayu who already arranged some parties to Kargo’s family. I thanked Tiger and Mr. Yodi as the CEO and CTO of Kargo because they valued a newbie like me, especially to Mr. Yodi, because he even asked me if I wanted to work remotely for Kargo!

How could I say no? Rangga approved it too. That’s why I said this experience was the first season. During my college study, I will work remotely for Kargo. Fortunately, I finished the required designs for Internal Dashboard so I didn’t have to worry too much about the offsite work. I still expect to get more jobs when I am going back to college. Rangga said that someone who experted in product design would come around the middle of March. Too bad I have to go back earlier so I can’t see her and learn something for improving my design skills. During the first season, I mostly learned a lot about product and engineering stuffs rather than designs. I learnt some product management skills like how to use JIRA and Confluence. I could fill JIRA with user stories, story points, etc. and fill Confluence with retrospective notes, morning stand up meeting notes, RFC (request for comments), PRD (product requirements document), etc. I really felt that I didn’t want to go too soon. Aah I wish I could graduate sooner. Rangga even said that I should quit college and work sooner in Kargo LOL I won’t.

To summarize, I worked for Kargo from January 8 - March 1. If I didn't have to go for the Most Outstanding Student Contest, I wanted to end the day on February 28. Luckily, March 1 was on Friday so basically I just had to complete the full weekdays. And now it's time to go back to the college reality!