Welcome to our monthly “Why I joined the Kogan.com engineering team” series! Every month, we talk with members of the Kogan.com engineering team to learn who they are and why they chose to pursue careers at Kogan.com.
Mengfei is our Designer extraordinaire who has been with us for over 4 years now. Her role sees her playing a big part in how our website interacts with our customers and she is involved in turning features developed by our engineers into user friendly applications for our customers. In her past time Mengfei loves to bake, travel and play the viola. Her superpower is spotting our pet cats lurking around our team’s backgrounds during video calls! Mengfei is also an avid photographer who regularly shares her brilliant snaps of her travels with the wider Kogan.com team.
Mengfei at Lake Tyrrell which is in between Melbourne CBD & Mildura
Describe what it’s like being a part of the Kogan.com Engineering team.
Busy, collaborative and an environment where creativity is embraced.
Every day we receive many requests from other teams, as well as feedback from customers. We also have new features that need to be analysed, designed, implemented, and released. As a UX designer at Kogan.com, I am always busy with proposing concepts, receiving feedback, and refining designs. During this process, there is a lot of room to be creative, especially when collaborating with other team members.
We’re always brainstorming various ways to solve usability issues, enhance the User experience, and deliver the best e-commerce site for our customers!
What is something unique about the Kogan.com Engineering team?
Our team is highly collaborative and we love supporting each other.
I joined Kogan.com 4 years ago as my first job after migrating to Australia. We were a team of 14 members at that time. In my time here, I have learnt a lot not only about design, but also about stakeholder management, negotiating requirements with developers, and even about the Australian culture!
During this time, I have gained so much knowledge about how customers interact with our site which helps with designing features for our customers so they have a great shopping experience.I have also been fortunate enough to be part of the team working on building new vertical sites aligning to our overall company growth strategy.
4 years ago, when I joined Kogan, I received a lot of support from team members. I had very little knowledge about front-end development at that time. The developers took time to walk me through the process, explored the different tools, and we worked together to find an efficient process to turn designs to implementation. Goran, our CTO, was always kind with his time and supported me to review my designs. He always empowered me and raised suggestions when I got stuck.
I am so proud to say that I have now become one of the key members in our team who supports others by providing these design suggestions. I also play a big part in the user acceptance testing process. This helps us to get familiar with products and features much faster.
Tell us about a work challenge you’ve had to recently resolve
Our team has doubled in size recently due to the growth of our business and we’re seeing more and more new faces join us! To ensure our new developers aren’t waiting for my designs, I’ve had to learn to manage my time more effectively so I can deliver on these designs for my team and stakeholders.
Tell us about your proudest moment at work
I am really proud to see the new features that I’ve designed, released and used by customers,(though this is the whole team’s effort not my own ^_^).