I direct, manage and lead a team of UX managers, design leads & designers for Agoda in Bangkok, Thailand to build highly converting & lovable products.
Recent work.
Below is a sample of collection of work from the past few years i have lead, managed and drove strategy for.
Search & discovery redesign
Product Design
Agoda marketplace
Product Design
Pandora Sponsored Listening
Product Design
Agoda refresh redesign
Product Design
My role at
Currently i am Sr Product Design Manager at Agoda ( a Booking Holdings Co. ) in Bangkok, Thailand. I manage a team of 22 that include design managers, design leads and UX designers.
My core expertise centers on having our team build usable, lovable and scalable experiences that are also highly converting and drive key business metrics.
I manage our front end design team that supports our hotel & accommodations business that focuses on building high converting products while supporting driving key business metrics.
I been at Agoda 4 1/2 years and was a huge part of helping build one of South East Asia’s premier design teams. When i joined Agoda we were a team of 12 and today we have scaled to a team of 50+ designers. I worked along side our Direct of Design and help build and scale our global design team of designers from 22+ countries here in Bangkok.
Recommendations
I’ve worked with Deven for several years at Agoda, his presence was immediately felt as he provided great leadership, business thinking, and problem solving skills that facilitated our work with the design team. He’s not only an excellent UX and design expert as well as team leader, but he’s also someone who’s deeply in touch with the business and product he’s working with.
David Salamon
Director of Product at Agoda
Not only great people manager when it comes to designers, Deven is a relied-upon bridge between product, design, and other parts of the business to infuse the vision, goals, and get everyone moving in the same direction.
Adam Hu
Principal Product Lead at Agoda
I have been working with Deven for the past 2.5 years at Agoda (Booking holdings), me as a product lead and he’s as a design manager.
During that time, Deven constantly proved to be a true asset to the company by driving vision and high standardization of how design products should look like.
All of his reports know exactly what is expected from them and seem like they truly bought into the way and path he dictated.
Chen Biran
Senior Product Lead at Agoda
Management Values
My role as a senior product design manager is to drive people success and product success that drives value to the business while creating career success stories for my team. I value building partnerships, trust, product growth to help measure the success of my team at Agoda.
People success
- Each designer feels like their unique talents & recognized, valued
- Designers feel like they are challenged to grow, but are supported
- Each designer feels like I care about career goals,, champion them
- Productive, healthy 1:1 meetings & design crits with clear takeaways
- Maintaining a high bar for each designer hired onto the team: each person is a culture-add
- Design team has diverse skillsets & cross-learning & peer mentorship
- Coaching designers to think like amazing product managers while executing as designers
- Developing leaders who are able to themselves grow high performing leaders and elevate the organization
- Aligning design ops, work flows, and structures with business goals
Project success
- Each designer has growth opportunities with the projects they take on
- Helping increase the level of craft and business impact of each designer’s project work
- Shared sense of ownership over the success of projects with product management and engineering
- Enabling strong cross-functional communication, collaboration, and ways of working
- Ensuring designers have enough maker time as opposed to meeting time
- Helping designers prioritize competing priorities from multiple stakeholders across multiple projects
- Increasing the visibility of projects and strategically aligning them with organizational goals
- Measuring design debt, and allocating time to address it appropriately
Design Management
- Deliver Quality. Quality is not simply creating a design that wows the product team. It is usually the result of considering more-subtle aspects of design like matching the scale of the solution to the problemnot over- or under-designingand innovating where appropriate and valuable rather than for innovation’s own sake. Too ambitious a design will turn off the product team
- Be Proactive . Designers who are proactive look for ways to work smarter. They are adept at independent problem solving. They look for ways to refine their designs by bringing people together and negotiating a compromise or by exploring alternatives, including the possibility that there may be no need for a design. They facilitate results.
- Be Resilient. Resilient designers have the “We have lemons; let’s make lemonade” attitude. They know when to make trade-offs and can identify opportunities. They are adaptable when the process is not going smoothly and avoid taking issues personally.
Product ownership
- The trio of design, product management, and engineering should have shared ownership over what gets built. Regardless of who comes up with the winning idea, all three parts of the trio need to be involved starting at the concept phase, through product release.
- Out with the waterfall method where ownership gets passed from department to department, and in with an agile, inclusive product development process that has fewer blind spots and that shares both ups and downs together. This enables people success and project success.
Growing leaders
- Developing leaders who can lead, set a vision, and grow other high performing leaders is required for scaling a design team and an organization at large. This requires self-awareness of one’s own strengths, and making room for others to lead.
Business value
- Understanding the KPIs, OKRs established from the product management team and breaking them down on design can help contribute.
- Understanding design needs to drive a balance between user experience & business value & tech constraints. Design, product, tech need to build a partnership to deliver on the KPIs & OKRs set my company and user needs.