Grab Rentals

Grab is a Southeast Asia's leading ride-hailing platform with 45 million downloads and up to 4 million daily rides. We solve critical transportation, logistics, and payments challenges in eight countries across the region.

The Problem

One of Grab’s businesses is car rentals, and the operations team uses a fragmented mix of internal and external tools to run their fleet business. This is inefficient as it is not scalable and has a high risk of information loss and error between systems.

The Goal

To design and build a V1 rental asset management system that allows efficient tracking of information for the supply chain lifecycle.

The Team

• 1 Product Manager

• 2 UX Designers

• 7 Developers

• 1 QA Engineer

User Research

Before diving straight into solutions, it’s necessary to understand how the team is operating, what their daily tasks look like, and what their pain points were.

Methods

• Contextual Inquiry

• Interviews

We visited warehouses, storage locations, and rental offices to observe the operations team. Interview sessions were also held to understand the journey of drivers renting a car, as well as the supply lifecycle of rental cars. This was crucial during the research to understand what areas the Operation team supports and where we can help. These user research visits also took place in Indonesia and Vietnam, Grab’s second and third biggest markets, because user behaviors and practices are very different from Singapore.

The most significant insight was how manual the workflow was. Workers are constantly switching between different systems to record or reference information. To add, there were multiple communication channels used between the teams. With such a fragmented system of tools, it was imperative that we figure out a solution not just for the workers’ sake, but also for the Grab Rentals business to scale.

Ideation and Workshopping

We took our research findings and facilitated a workshop to deep dive on what happens at each stage of the user journey and to understand where our potential solution fits in. Other goals of the workshop:

• Determine business objectives and success metrics

• Understand and align with the problems we are solving on both sides

• Uncover risks, constraints, issues, dependencies

• Next steps, roles, responsibilities

Some Key Product Features

Through stakeholder votes, affinity mapping, and prioritizing with the team, we defined the MVP:

• Booking & Reservation Management - manage majority of your operations in one portal, anytime anywhere

• Vehicle Tracking - identify which items are due to be returned and where specific equipment is

• Driver & Customer Management - manage drivers & customers within the portal

• Dashboard and Reporting - understand  business performance and growth at a glance

Usability Testing (or so we thought)

After sketching, wireframing, and early mockups, we conducted usability tests to see if users are able to navigate the interface of our early design. We also tested what gaps we were missing in the user flows.

But we ran into a lot of complications.

The solution needs to track and resolve complex operational use cases and the stakeholders educated us on how complicated the rental lifecycle can be. Each country’s market also has their own unique processes due to country regulations around registration and payments. Countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia also rent out motorbikes which are handled differently from cars. This really emphasized how important this portal will be for the team to work better together.

Design, Review, Repeat

We adopted an iterative work cycle where we regularly collaborated with engineers and stakeholders to ensure we had the correct operational flows in place before we passed off designs for coding. It was a long phase of the project; we would get good validation, but not without leading to another use case our system had to account for.

As we continued to grind and refine over months, an MVP was ready to be tested in Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam - the first markets we plan to release to.

What’s Going On Now?

Looking back, this was not an easy project and it was overwhelming at times as the scope of use cases continued to grow and grow. Fortunately, I had a great team of bright, motivated people who truly cared about solving these our user’s problems. With a focused timeline and close collaboration, GrabJaya recently launched in June 2019! We are continuing to get feedback from the team and thinking about how to evolve the product as the company grows.