Working at Grab Indonesia: How My Life Transformed in One Year
Last year, to be exact, in March 2021 I officially joined the leading superapps in Southeast Asia, which is famously known as Grab, as part of their QA engineering team. The past one year has been a rollercoaster ride for me. It was challenging, nerve-wracking, but also fun at the same time.
In Grab, my main responsibility as a QA Engineer is to oversee the testing and quality of the product prior to release and to make sure that Grab’s customers are satisfied with our features. One of the projects that I am currently working on is Grab Academy for our agent partners. Grab Academy itself is a platform designed for Grab’s partner and agent. For agent partners, Grab Academy helps them to self-learn about the application, how to use it, how to increase sales, how to promote their business, and so on. Another project that I did is called Grab AM and Sales. It is a platform designed for internal teams, especially the Account Management team, to track the performance of the sellers. Before, Grab’s team has to meet the sellers one by one and go to their stores to be able to see how they are doing. But with Covid-19, it has been difficult to travel and meet people. Luckily, we were able to launch Grab AM and Sales for the internal team last year. Honestly, I am beyond grateful to be a part of the team that made all of that possible.
Earlier, I stated that I am responsible for checking the quality of the product before it is released, right? As I wrote this sentence I am thinking that you might be curious about how we as an engineer launch the product. First, the engineering team gathered and the product manager presented new features that are going to be worked on. After that, software engineers started working on their stuff, like creating engineering specs and so on. At the same time, we as QA engineers started to create a test plan, test cycle, and test case, along with the software engineer and product manager to review it. If it’s approved, then software engineers start to develop new features. After all of the features have been developed by the software engineer, QA starts to test it. Testing is done in a staging environment to determine if the product is passed or failed. If failed, then I will create a report and send it to the developers team.
After all testing is done, the QA Engineer then creates a sign of the ticket to inform the team that the feature is ready to launch in the production environment.
I’ve learned a lot during my first year at Grab Indonesia. This experience has transformed my life especially in the communication area and my expertise in the QA field. My QA skills were limited back then, yet thankfully my fellow Grabbers (we call employees at Grab as Grabbers) are very supportive and helpful.They helped me to develop my capability in the QA area through many discussions and problem solving experience . For my communication skills, at first I faced some challenges in language accent since I work with teammates across nations that have different cultures. Not only those two significant changes, I also feel that my work really matters because I can contribute to the society at the same time, especially empowering the economic condition of our agent partner in Indonesia.
Lastly, for those who are thinking of joining the engineering team at Grab, my advice is just to try it. If you feel that you have, like 8 skills out of 10 skills that are required, just try and apply for the position. Don’t be afraid to try, and there are a lot of people who are going to help you here. If you want to see available positions, you can check our career website on grab.careers.
Thank you for reading my first Medium and see you in my next article.
