Jessica Fink

I think I had the biggest learning curve joining the engineering team at Grab. I was reading these postmortem reports full of words I didn’t understand. But thankfully, it hasn’t been called out as a blocker for me. The secret is to find a person who has the answers and make some good friends who can help you with that translation into more consumer-friendly language. 

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Not being super technical can also be an advantage, because you always come in with not a technical mindset but a consumer mindset. If you tell me this issue with whatever servers or whatever part of the infrastructure, I’m immediately thinking “What does it mean for the customer? What does it look like in the app?” because that's what we ultimately care about. It’s a helpful way to gauge if our communication is giving users what they need.

At Grab we tried to define a long list of metrics that we wanted to look at and say “this is the top five”, and the problem is that if you ask five different teams what their top five is you will get five different answers. What we really gained from these conversations is the idea that whoever is ultimately owning the service needs to define those metrics for themselves. But if I were to pick one from my personal experience working in contact centers and support for such a long time, I’d probably say triaging time is one that always falls off blindly. People tend to underestimate or ignore the impact that you can get from optimizing how quickly you can get the issue to the right team. 

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Having done it twice now, my advice is to pack light. You really can buy everything again. Don't waste time on shipping and packing too many boxes. It’s really fun if you can grab your luggage and just show up one day with your most important stuff, then just start from scratch from there. It’s an interesting opportunity to rebuild your style, your interests, your hobbies. I would highly recommend everyone do it at least once in their life.

So I think this is somewhat Singaporean — I haven't seen it much elsewhere yet, but it may be in Malaysia. It's a salted egg chicken. It's creamy salted egg sauce with crispy chicken and rice. It is delicious. It's not healthy at all, unfortunately, but it's very very good. I've not seen it anywhere else and I could eat a kilogram of it.

I play Dungeon and Dragons a lot, so it's probably all the apps I use to play D&D and all related tabletop games. You build huge character sheets and you need to keep track of them, and there are really good apps out there that help you do that instead of trying to keep it all on paper.