Grab Search Personalisation

As the Design Manager for the Search & Personalization (S&P) team at Grab—a Super App known for food delivery and ride-hailing—I led a group of designers working across core surfaces such as merchant discovery, search, reviews, and recommendation systems. Our mission was to make recommendations more relevant, explainable, and trustworthy, especially as Grab scaled personalization across verticals.

Search and Personalization had been a core platform at Grab for over a decade. With this level of product maturity, the next wave of impact required deep systems thinking, strategic design leadership, and close collaboration across functions.

Team structure

• 3 Product designers & 1 content designer
• Cross collaboration and influence with 3 vertical teams: Food, Mart, Dine-out with 15+ designers
• Working closely with 6 PMs, 4 PAs, 2 DS managers and 2 EG managers
• Weekly collaboration with Head of Product and Head of Engineering.

Team Building & Growth

When I joined, the team was in a period of transition: one designer moved with me from my previous team, another had just joined Grab, and a third transitioned in from a different vertical. I focused on bringing this group together—establishing team rituals, building trust, and onboarding them to the S&P domain.

I introduced weekly 1:1s and Monday planning sessions to help each designer manage their scope effectively. These touchpoints gave space for problem-solving, coaching through complex situations, and regular alignment on design quality and outcomes.

I work closely with each designer to understand their growth areas, aspirations, and working styles. Through regular conversations and check-ins, I help them map their current projects to their long-term goals—ensuring that their scope supports both impact and development.

Task prioritisation and visibility

• Design Roadmap Prioritisation template: Built a Design priority format for individual designers. Enabling them to take control of their scope, own their bandwidth planning with their PMs
• FE planning template with engineers: managing development pipeline directly with FE managers as design are underway and ready to prioritise the high impact projects

Building accountability for good experience

The Product team was operating reactively, primarily responding to edge cases raised by leadership. This led to noise in prioritisation and a lack of clarity in solutioning. I introduced rituals and practices that empowered each team member to take ownership of experience gaps within their problem space.

Dogfooding: Implemented internal team practices to identify pain points firsthand and create direct feedback loops between product teams and actual user experience, ensuring accountability for quality improvements.

Quality Task Force: Initiated and led a cross-functional task force to improve recommendation quality, addressing user-framed challenges and established sustainable workflows that became a model for issue tracking and intervention across the organization.

User Research: Enabled the team to lead user studies across different product areas and consolidated insights into actionable themes that aligned with both UX and data model gaps.

Leveraging user’s voice to influence

Reframed stakeholder conversations around user problems rather than feature requests, resulting in stronger alignment across disciplines.

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I vibe coded a dashboard from the survey data for faster analysis

The issues uncovered from the survey analysis directly made into the roadmap ⛳️

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After seeing the value of direct user feedback that gives more ownership to the team and clarity in priority, the team was encouraged to scale the in-app survey feature to more touchpoints.

Driving discovery on Grab

• Shared Design Narrative: Built a collective vision for the Search and Personalization design team by connecting different projects and capabilities into a cohesive story.
• Merchant Card Redesign: Led design of behavioural nudges consistently across three teams. Reinforced key user decisions like popular picks and trusted options using both system intelligence and user-generated content to improve recommendation transparency.

Design led projects

Design representation in leadership forums was weak when I joined the team, with no design solution coming to leaders for feedback or discussion. I worked with each designer to find them opportunity to work on significant design scope and share that in forums where design could find its footing as a thought leader.

This meant getting them excited about each problem they were solving, signing them up for presenting in a room full of people and supporting them through each step in unique ways for each designer.