How LinkAja’s teams drive growth

With an estimated 83 million people who still lack access to formal financial services, Indonesia has one of the largest unbanked and underbanked populations in the world. Credit card penetration is also lagging at a meagre 0.07 credit cards per capita. 

LinkAja was formed in 2019 to tackle this opportunity by providing e-wallet solutions to Indonesia’s unbanked and underbanked population. In just two years, they acquired over 73 million registered users and have become one of the top e-payment solutions in the country. 

A key driver of success was the close partnership between their Product and Marketing teams throughout the growth process. We spoke to Rasis Maulana Setiawan, Digital Marketing Lead at LinkAja, and Saskia Amalia Aryono, Product Owner at LinkAja, to understand how they collaborate effectively.

It’s clear that Product and Marketing collaboration is taken seriously at LinkAja. Can you tell us why?

Rasis: Traditionally, Product and Marketing typically work in silos. Many in our team have experienced it in previous companies so we knew that we wanted to avoid this at LinkAja.

What we can see in our workflows is that the experiments run and insights gathered by Product and Marketing are very related and intertwined. I’ve observed many experiments run separately by Product and Marketing [at other companies] which actually had the same objectives. Why undergo such a hassle when the objectives are the same?

Right at the beginning, we knew we had to be aligned in terms of business objectives, metric languages, and sharing of new insights and experiments.

Saskia: It’s important to have the same objectives and focus metrics so that we are always on the same page rather than having our own agenda. If not, both teams will tend to compete rather than collaborate on things like product roadmap prioritization.

How did you start this close collaboration?

Rasis: Our first step was to ensure our technology was aligned to our objectives. This is how we decided on Mixpanel and Braze to be our key partners, as they are integrated with each other. Our main criteria was for our product analytics and messaging automation tools to be able to communicate easily — in terms of facilitating communication within the Marketing and Product teams, as well as integration between the tools.

Saskia: After finding the right technology partner for Product and Marketing to collaborate with, we came together to define our key focus metrics, broke them down into our main metrics for conversion, engagement and retention, and collaborated in customer journey design and customer lifecycle management.

It’s important to have the same objectives and focus metrics … If not, both teams will tend to compete rather than collaborate on things like product roadmap prioritization.

Can you share some examples of how you collaborated?

Saskia: One example would be our activation flow. To nurture new users to become active users, we need to ensure our activation flow has high conversion rates and users find value in our app sooner. 

The Product team has to keep optimizing and reiterating the initial onboarding flow to ensure that users complete the initial steps of creating the account and are directed to the home page. 

After the customer successfully registers the account, the customer lifecycle journey starts and we work closely with Marketing to ensure that users experience the value of our app soon after registering.

Rasis: Right after users go through the onboarding process, we start tracking for a series of events in Mixpanel and Braze to map out the customer’s journey in discovering the product.

We have a ‘golden week’ to nurture users, which is the first seven days after a user has signed up for their account. This is important as adoption within the first seven days is a key indicator of long-term user retention.Throughout that first seven days, we set up a series of automated messages ranging from educational to promotional to prompt users to start adopting the services. From there, we bucket users into two groups: ‘Adoption’ users and ‘Stale Sign Up’ users. We discussed heavily with the Product team to nail down the definition of what qualifies as ‘Adoption’ or ‘Stale Sign Up’. 

The Product and Marketing teams are the key drivers for defining the customer lifecycle, so we make sure we are aligned on key metrics and terminology. This makes it easy for Marketing to communicate with the Product and Engineering teams.

What’s in your tech stack? How did an integrated tech stack help with Product-Marketing alignment?

Rasis: We are using Mixpanel for product analytics, Braze for in-app marketing and Appsflyer for mobile attribution. One of our main criteria was that the tools used across Product and Marketing should be fully integrated.

We don’t have a big team, so we really wanted to cut down the reporting process. With our stack, we can easily send campaign data from Braze to Mixpanel. From there, Product can simply log into Mixpanel to view consolidated data, reports and insights. 

This helped to improve our internal communications with all stakeholders and ensured that everyone was seeing the same set of data, and looking at the same focus metrics. We also cut down on many offline meetings to present the data, as we could just share a link to a Mixpanel report instead.

We also wanted to be able to achieve a reciprocal workflow, so all three tools—Mixpanel, Braze and Appsflyer—talk to each other. For example, we use Braze Currents to push campaign data into Mixpanel in real time. On the other hand, we can also send specific audiences that performed events tracked only in Mixpanel to Braze for targeting of marketing messages.

Any last advice for companies seeking to build Product-Marketing collaboration?

Saskia: Every company should have a single source of truth when it comes to data.  For LinkAja, this is a combination of their first party data from users, secondary data from tools like Mixpanel and Braze, along with qualitative research from the Customer Experience team. All this will add up to create strong justifications across cross-functional teams on every product decision to be made.

Rasis: If you boil down to our key principle, it’s about being customer-first. When you focus on the customer, you will inevitably look at the key data signals from them and keep your product and processes clean and uncomplicated. With all teams looking towards the same objective, Product-Marketing alignment will come naturally.

Hear directly from LinkAja

Braze hosted a webinar with Mixpanel and LinkAja to delve into the converging worlds of Product and Marketing. Watch it on demand to hear:

• How product and marketing teams traditionally worked in silos and why this is changing
• How are goals similar or different for each team
• How Product and Marketing use various tools to achieve a shared vision of improving customer experience and optimizing product and marketing decisions