I used to use my gut feeling and intuition to tell what’s good and what’s not, even for critiquing my own designs and work.

Not because I was careless. I genuinely believed I had been thorough. I had spent hours on it. I believed I had looked at it from every angle. It felt right and that ‘feeling’ was the problem.

Being close to your work is not the same as understanding it. And for a long time, I confused the two.

Skipping self-critique has real consequences. They just tend to show up at the worst possible moment. Work gets submitted with decisions that were never challenged. When a reviewer asks why something was done a certain way, the designer either can’t answer or scrambles to reconstruct a rationale they’ve already forgotten, or hasn’t ever considered.

Inconsistencies slip through. A spacing rule applied on one screen but ignored on the next. A hierarchy that made sense in isolation but breaks down across the flow. Trust erodes quietly. Not because the designer lacks skill, but because the work still carries the fingerprints of someone who was too close to it when they called it done.

Over time, the absence of self-critique doesn’t just affect the output. It limits how fast you grow. Without the habit of interrogating your own decisions, you stop building the vocabulary to explain your craft to yourself, your team, and the people you are designing for.

The real design self-critique failure mode isn’t laziness

Usually, designers do look at their work before submitting. That’s not where the gap is.

The gap is that they critique against nothing.

No ground. No principles. No framing. The review becomes: does this look right? Does this feel good? And because you made it, it almost always does. Your eye is already calibrated to what you built, not to what was actually needed.

This is especially common for middleweight designers. Not because we are less capable, but because nobody explicitly teaches this in our culture, especially if you’re self thaught. You learn to execute. You learn to iterate. But the practice of interrogating your own decisions before anyone else does is rarely discussed, rarely modelled, and in many design teams here in Malaysia, rarely even practised.

The word ‘critique’, already carries weight in Malaysian context. It sounds like conflict. It sounds like something that happens to your work, not something you do for it. That mindset has to change.

Design self-critique needs a ground

Here is what I have learned: self-critique is not a final step. It is only possible if you have set the foundation upfront.

Before you open Figma, before you write the first word, before you decide on a layout, ask yourself: what user outcome am I solving for? What principles am I carrying through this work? What does good actually look like here?

That is your ground. Everything you build gets measured against it, not against whether it looks polished.

When I started doing this, the critique became less subjective and more structured. I could ask real questions. Why did I use rows of three in this card list? Why this colour here? Why this hierarchy? If I had a reason and a grounded reason tied to the framing, the decision holds. If I could not answer, that was the critique finding me first.

Not intuitive. Intentional.

Write your rationale down as you go

The second shift was documentation, not for handoff, not for the client, but for myself.

Every design is a sequence of decisions. And most designers make those decisions well in the moment, then let them disappear. The rationale lives in their head, and by the time a reviewer asks why, they have either forgotten or can only reconstruct it verbally on the spot.

Writing decisions down as you go changes this completely. Not everything. Just the ones that matter. Why you chose this approach over the alternative. What you were optimising for. What you deliberately left out.

When you include your thinking alongside the work and not just the visual, but the reasoning behind it, two things happen. First, you are forced to articulate what you actually believe, which sharpens the thinking. Second, when you come back to critique, you have something real to interrogate. Not just a screenshot, but a position, grounded against your foundational framing.

A reviewer asking why you made a decision should never catch you off guard. If it does, that is a signal that the critique was incomplete.”

And now with AI where you can augment the design assembly process, it is more and more critical to be conscious about the goal, principles and how to execute at every step along the way. This is what design work look like at Stampede, less executing and assembly, more strategic thinking and tactical planning.

Create distance before you do self-critique

The third thing, and the one most junior designers skip entirely: walking away before you review.

After a session of deep work, you are still the author. Your eye will fill in the gaps, smooth over the rough edges, and read what you intended, not what is actually there. You are too close to see clearly.

The fix is temporal distance. Close the laptop. Do something else. Come back in half an hour, or better, the next morning.

I have finished work in the evening and told myself I would do the self-critique first thing the following day and come back to find things I simply could not have seen the evening before. Not because I was tired. Because I had forgotten what I was trying to do, and that forgetting is exactly the point. Fresh eyes read the work the way a user would, not the way its creator would.

Seasoned designers can do this in real-time. They have developed the ability to zoom out mid-flow, switch modes, and critique in live. That is the goal. But for most of us especially Malaysian middleweights, the shortcut is physical and temporal separation. And it works.

The other thing worth naming: do not be married to what you built. Don’t be afraid to murder your darlings. This sounds obvious, but it is harder than it sounds. When you have spent hours on something, it’s only natural to defend it. You will subconsciously frame your review to protect the decisions you have already made. The only way past this is to approach the review with genuine openness. Treating your own work the way you would treat someone else’s.

Sharpen the eye by dissecting other people’s work

Self-critique gets easier the more you study good work.

Not to copy it. To understand it.

When you open an app, a website, a data visualisation, pause and ask why things are the way they are. What is the grid? Why this spacing? Why does this interaction feel smooth when a similar one elsewhere feels clunky? What is the overarching principles and the intent of the design? What is it trying to solve ultimately?

Most of us consume design passively. We notice when something looks nice. Few of us stop to deconstruct why it works and fewer still ask why it doesn’t, even when it looks fine on the surface.

The more you practise this on other people’s work, the more naturally you do it on your own. You start to notice the questions before a reviewer does. You start to ask, before anyone else: if someone looked at this with fresh eyes, what would they challenge?

That shift from creator to first critic, is what the practice is building toward. It’s building that muscle so it comes natural to you the more you mature as a designer.

Where this ends up

Eventually, none of this should feel like extra work. The framing, the documentation, the distance, the dissection. These should become so embedded in how you work that finishing and critiquing are the same act.

For designers who have been self-critiquing for over twenty years, that is already true. The critique is happening constantly, live, almost invisibly. It is in the DNA.

For the rest of us, we build toward it. We make the scaffold visible until it becomes instinct.

The measure, for now, is simple: before you ship, can you answer for every decision? Not defend it. Just answer for it.

If you can’t, you are not there yet.

The post Building the Eye: A Guide to Designer Self-Critique appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

The designers I trust with the most complex briefs share one habit. They spend the opening days of a project reading the organisation before they read the brief. They work out what this team can absorb, what it can act on, what will land and what will sit in a folder regardless of quality. They do this before ideation. Sometimes, before they ask a single design question.

We call this reading the organisation. And it takes four diagnostic questions before Figma is opened.

The ones who skip this step are not worse designers. Often they are better at the craft and so that makes this harder to see.

Strong visual execution earns early praise. The feedback loop is immediate and feels like progress. Nothing in that signal tells you it is pointing in the wrong direction.

But approval in a design review and influence over what actually gets built are not the same thing. Most teams are too polite to say the work missed the moment. They praise it, note it for future reference and move on. The designer leaves the room thinking it went well.

They only find out much later, when the product ships, that their work gets partially used, quietly reduced or shelved for a future sprint that never comes.

It is usually not a design problem

When good work goes nowhere, our first instinct is to question the work. Should we refine the flows? Improve the fidelity? Perhaps present better?

The more I have watched this pattern, the more I am convinced the problem is almost never the quality of the design. It is the sequencing.

Sequencing, in design work, means understanding what the organisation is ready to receive and act on before deciding what to produce. The best method applied at the wrong moment is not rigorous—it is wasted.

We often look at constraints through the lens of budget, timeline and trade-offs. Those are real. But they are not what determines whether work lands.

The more consequential constraint I’ve seen is organisational readiness: what decisions are still live, who has the authority to act on findings, whether design has ever changed anything here before. That is what the order of design operations has to be built around, not the project plan.

This is what it looks like in practice

Part of working closely with in-house teams is that we get to observe how designers navigate the gap between what they are given and what they are set up to succeed with.

We worked with an in-house designer who was doing everything right. She received the requirements, hit the timeline and thought through the trade-offs. The solution was considered and beautifully executed. It was current, polished and genuinely impressive. The review was glowing.

And yet none of it made it into the final product.

The brief had given her enough room that she took it as a mandate to rethink the problem. So she did. What she did not know was that product and engineering had already aligned on a direction before the requirements reached her.

When her solution landed in the room, it was too ambitious for where the team was. They praised it, parked it for a future redesign that may or may not come, and shipped what the developers had already built. It was faster. It was good enough and it was already done.

Naming the gap

We call this gap design execution without organisational reading.

The trouble is design education teaches craft and method. It teaches designers to solve the problem in front of them. What it almost never teaches is how to read whether the organisation is ready to receive that solution. Whether the problem is still live, whether anyone has the authority to act on the answer, whether the conditions exist for the work to land at all.

That is a different skill entirely. Without it, the craft goes to waste.

It is also what sits underneath most design maturity gaps, where you have teams that are technically skilled but structurally misaligned with the organisations they are designing for.

What reading the organisation looks like in the first week

At Stampede, user-centred design sits at the core of what we do. Often we associate the word “user” with the end user, the people using the app or service. But there’s a more immediate user of our design work: the organisation itself. To be truly embracing user-centred design, we must serve this group first.

As such, meeting people in the organisation where they are, not where we think they should be, is not a compromise. It is the work.

That shift in thinking changes what we pay attention to in the first week of any project. The signals are the same whether you are an external or an in-house designer who has been at the company for three years.

If anything, I’d argue that being an in-house designer is harder. Familiarity makes it harder. When you already know a team, it’s too easy to go in with the assumption that you know what they are ready for.

Where do we begin navigating? We begin by asking targeted, strategic questions.

Here is the organisational terrain I encourage my designers to canvas in the first week of their project. It’s four questions and they cover: whether design has ever changed a decision here, who actually holds the authority to act, whether this is a discovery or execution project and what “design” means to the people who will use the output.

Let’s take a look at what each of them means.

1. Has design ever changed a decision here?

Not whether they have a design system. We’re asking whether past design thinking has visibly changed what the product became.

A team that says “we tried a different pattern for that flow and it didn’t perform” uses design as evidence. A team that says “we did a big redesign two years ago” and moves on is using it as a credential. Those are not the same thing.

2. Who actually has the authority to move this work forward?

Not who is in the kickoff room. In many Malaysian organisations, hierarchy shapes how decisions are communicated as much as how they are made. Disagreement with a senior leader rarely surfaces directly in a meeting but rather moves through other channels, later and quietly.

Here, the most senior person in the room will nod, stay quiet or say the work looks good. That doesn’t necessarily mean a decision has been made. The actual decision-maker is often a layer up and they may be absent from the brief and reviews and only visible when a direction gets quietly reversed after a presentation they were not in.

The answer to who has the authority is not always obvious and has to be inferred from who the room defers to when a direction is questioned, from whose silence carries more weight than anyone else’s words.

3. Is this a discovery project or an execution project?

Design can enter a project at very different points.

Sometimes it is upstream, where design is involved before the solution exists, helping shape what gets built and why.

Sometimes it is downstream and designers are brought in after the direction has been set, to design it well and make it real. Both are legitimate but not interchangeable.

Engineering-led teams, common in our market, often scope and estimate the solution before design is involved. By the time the brief reaches the designer, the upstream decisions have already been made, and often in conversations that happened weeks earlier. What remains is now a downstream ask: take this direction and make it work.

That is not a lesser role. But treating it as an open mandate when it is not will most likely backfire on good intentions and erode the team’s trust in design as a function.

4. What does “design” mean to the people who will act on it?

Within the Malaysian present context, when a team says they need a designer, they mean someone to produce screens that are clean, polished and on brand. That is a legitimate ask but it is not the only thing design can be.

The gap opens when a designer assumes they have been brought in to shape the problem. To run discovery, frame the brief, challenge the direction, while the team assumed they were getting someone to make the solution look good. Neither party states their assumption. In a high-context culture like ours, neither party will.

So ask them directly: when they say “design”, do they mean making it look good, making it work better or making the right thing in the first place?

Where does asking these questions lead us?

Together, these four questions give you a clear, precise picture of what this organisation is actually ready for and where design sits within it.

Design’s track record tells you whether design has influencing power here. Whether it has ever been the reason a direction changed, or whether it has only ever been the thing that made a decision look better after it was already made.

Whether the role is upstream or downstream tells you something about access. It is how close to the problem design is allowed to get before the solution starts forming without it. In most Malaysian organisations, this is not stated in the brief. By the time it reaches you, the direction has often already been set, very likely in conversations you were not part of. What looks like an open mandate may already have walls around it.

Those two questions provide you with a reading and an opening move to consider.

The grid

The grid maps two readings against each other.

• Design’s track record. This is the vertical axis. Has design influenced decisions here before, or is it still earning that standing? This tells you how much trust you are starting with, before you have produced a single thing.
• Design’s role. The horizontal axis. Has design been brought in upstream to shape the problem, or downstream to execute a direction already set? This tells you how much of the problem space is still open, and how much has already closed without you.

Together, they place you in one of four positions, each with a different opening move.

Top-left: upstream, design has changed decisions here
The rarest configuration. The team has a track record of acting on what design surfaces and you have been given genuine access to the problem. The risk here is not failure — it is wasting the position by playing it safe. Take the harder problem, not the safer brief.

Top-right: downstream, design has changed decisions here
The team trusts design but the direction was already set before you arrived. This is not a slight but simply where you are in this cycle. The mistake is spending energy trying to reopen a brief that was never meant to be reopened. Execute sharply and find the one decision still live to continue earning the trust.

Bottom-left: upstream, design has not changed decisions here
The most common configuration for designers entering a new organisation or team. The mandate looks open but the organisation has no muscle memory for acting on what design surfaces. Building up to a big reveal means your findings arrive after the decisions have already closed. The team will nod, note it for next time and move on. The antidote is to structure your work in batches. Share findings while decisions are still live and people can still act on them.

Bottom-right: downstream, design has not changed decisions here
You have a defined problem but no established credibility yet. The temptation is to overdeliver on the brief to prove worth. The more effective move is to make your reasoning visible alongside your output, how you got there, not just what you produced. That is what shifts the position over time.

What design means and who has the authority

The other two questions, what “design” means to the people acting on it, and who actually has the authority to move the work forward serve as your operating conditions. They don’t change your position on the grid but they determine how much friction stands between you and the opening move your position calls for.

For example, a designer in the right quadrant who cannot get the real decision-maker in the room, or whose definition of design doesn’t match the team’s, is working against resistance that the grid alone won’t show.

The grid tells you how to start, not how to stay. Position shifts as credibility builds and as the team’s appetite for design’s involvement grows. Misreading it in either direction is costly, so it helps to be honest about where you actually are rather than where you would like to be.

You may move with too much ambition where trust hasn’t been established, risk getting the work admired but ultimately shelved. On the other hand, moving too cautiously where the mandate is genuinely open would lead to the window closing before you’ve used it.

Like in chess, the question is not what the ideal move looks like. It is what move is available from where you are standing right now.

The opening move is a design decision

For designers trained to do thorough work, the best move may be counterintuitive to what you really want to do and the impact you want to make. Choosing a lighter scope often feels like settling.

The truth is, arguing for a bigger move before you have earned the standing is the most common mistake. It is also the most avoidable one.

The designers who moved the furthest in the organisations I have watched did not start with the most ambitious brief. They start with the piece of work that earns them enough trust. This then creates a shared language and wins to make the next move possible. They chose the move deliberately, not out of safety but because it was right for where the organisation was.

The right opening move is not the most thorough piece of work you could produce. It is the piece that shifts the organisation’s position. One that shows a sceptical PM what research actually surfaces, or gives engineers and designers a shared reference point for the first time.

Small work that shifts a position is worth more than ambitious work that lands nowhere.

The grid is not to limit what you do. Rather, it tells you what to do first.

What this means for how we develop designers

This habit of reading the organisation first is learned. Nobody arrives with it.

How quickly it develops depends on the environment around the designer. The leadership models, what managers enable and what product teams make visible. It is a shared responsibility and it looks different depending on where you sit.

If you are a designer The fastest way to develop this is to be in the room before you are asked to produce anything. The kickoff. The stakeholder introduction. The early conversations where nothing has been designed yet. That exposure starts as observation but must become active: forming your own read of the room, testing it against what emerges, adjusting before the brief hardens.

If you are a design leader The designers who develop this fastest are the ones you bring into those rooms deliberately. Not to present. To observe and to learn. This is the education many senior designers still need and rarely get. Without it, the only way to learn is from having work go nowhere enough times that you start asking different questions. That is a slower and more demoralising path than it needs to be. You can shorten it significantly.

If you are a product manager The designers who will serve you best are the ones who understand what your team is ready to act on before they design anything. You can accelerate this by being transparent early. Share with them what is already decided, who needs to be in the room and what success looks like to the people above you. That context is not a constraint on the design. It is what makes the design useful.

A designer who reads the room well and starts simply will outperform a designer who starts ambitiously in the wrong direction. Every time.

—

If this resonates and you are trying to work out what your design practice is ready for next, I would be glad to think it through with you. You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out to our team.

The post Good designers read the brief—great ones read the organisation appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Back in 2008, I was a Malaysian designer working across cultures and continents, riding the Web 2.0 wave, trying to figure out technology and nurture this seed of a studio called Stampede.

Discovering Naz, a fellow Malaysian designer navigating Silicon Valley, made me feel seen. Someone who understood that craft is its own reward. That seeking meaning in our work isn’t unusual.

Someone from here, who looked like me and was obsessed over things that seemed small to others but mattered deeply to us.

I later learned this was the power of representation. Being in similar places now, it’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly.

What started as dinner…

Like the best of things, none of this was planned. Two weeks before his visit, Naz got in touch so we could meet in KL. What started as dinner plans turned into a homecoming, a return to Malaysia and also to a community of practitioners who share his curiosity about craft and meaning.

“Back in 2000, there were maybe a handful of web designers in the world,” Naz reflected, talking about the early days when people built the internet because they were curious, not because there was money in it. “And then more recently, at Config, I saw thousands of designers at Moscone Centre and thought, wow, look how far our profession has come.”

Our Makers Circle format is borrowed from those old Parisian salons where intellectuals gathered and talked to each other late into the evening. There, there was intentionality, a choice for quiet conversation and a space created for thinking together.

UOB’s beautiful hall was perfect for this kind of discourse. It was spacious for deep conversations and elegant to honour the discourse. Our thanks to them for hosting us again.

Starting with intention

But the evening started with something you’d never see at a tech conference: silence.

Naz guided seventy practitioners through a brief meditation, asking us to let go of whatever had been eating at us all day. The whole hall was quiet, lights dimmed, eyes closed. We let go of the day’s scattered energy and entered the Circle with open hearts and minds.

I loved the renewed evening energy.

Naz’s Perspectives: philosophy, meets practice

Now whenever Naz and I talk, it somehow always comes back to craft. He’s the kind of friend you can pick up conversations with months later, exactly where you left off.

In fact, I learned the word “shokunin” from Naz. It’s this Japanese idea of master craftspeople who spend their entire lives perfecting one thing. Not just skill, but people who dedicate themselves completely to their craft, finding deep purpose in perfecting the smallest details.

Watching Naz share his Silicon Valley experience made it feel like thoughts and ideas were clicking into place. He talked about experiencing multiple booms and busts, his work at True Ventures and designing for inclusion. He shared how his team’s redesign of Adobe.com failed with Japanese audiences because it lacked that consideration for cultural diversity and understanding the culture and environment in which the design lives and breathes.

In the midst of figuring out what it actually means to make things when machines are getting better at making them too, these are the stories that stick with you. There’s tendency to gravitate towards success stories but mind the survivorship bias. Most times, it’s real failures that teach you something.

AI and the future of craft

We also touched on AI replacing designers. Naz shared a beautiful story about Bruce Swedien, the legendary sound engineer who worked with Michael Jackson.

Bruce was never afraid to share his knowledge. He taught workshops, wrote books and discussed his experiences openly. He’d share how he and MJ would tinker with mixes for hours, making over 90 different versions of “Billie Jean” alone.

When people asked if he was concerned others would copy the techniques he so generously shared, Bruce’s response was profound: nobody could replicate his creative future, just his past techniques.

Post-Circle, that was the bit that got me thinking. I was curious, so I Googled bruce up. Which led me to something he said that really resonates with designers navigating automation today.

Back in 2006, when digital sales were overtaking CDs, inexpensive hardware and software meant musicians could craft professional-level recordings from their bedrooms. Bruce saw this shift but far from being defensive, he was jubilant.

“What I find most promising now is that musicians have easy access to recording technology that is far better than at any time in the past. The music recording is going to be put back in the hands of people who truly love music for music’s sake.”

Replace “recording technology” with “AI tools” and his vision becomes rather prescient.

The shift to meaning

“There’s this rejection happening,” Naz said of senior designers globally who are walking away from big corporate jobs to do work that actually matters. “After Jason Santa Maria left Shopify and Ethan Marcotte left 18F, everyone’s doing their own thing again. We all want to do things that matter and practice our craft.”

The value hierarchy is shifting.

These are experienced practitioners who’ve seen how corporate pressures can dilute good work. They’re not rejecting profit. They’re rejecting the specific trade-offs that come with a scale-at-all-costs culture.

It reminds me of how my friend Ben Bowes at GovTech Singapore puts it perfectly: “Earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time in what I call the ‘more industry.’ Helping companies get people to buy more, watch more, consume more. After a while, it wore me down. I wanted my work to mean more than an uptick in shareholder value.”

This wasn’t some abstract philosophy. It lives in the choices we make.

The Salon Experiment: flipping the script

Naz and I then experimented with something we don’t often see at a tech event: a proper salon. Borrowing from those 18th-century Parisian gatherings where intellectuals debated ideas long into the evening, we turned the audience from passive listeners into the real stars of the show.

Naz moved around the audience, no longer the visiting expert but genuinely curious about what we’re building here. The role reversal was beautiful. He asked the questions and people responded with shared insights about Malaysian design that Silicon Valley rarely gets to hear.

“How many of you know each other here?” Quite a few hands went up—many had attended our larger Makers gatherings. But among them I spotted a good few newcomers too, joining our tight-knit community for the first time.

“What’s the actual state of things here? The real practitioner version?”

What happened next felt like watching trust build in real time. People opened up.

They shared design journeys, accomplishments, frustrations and the emergence of distinctly Malaysian design language thanks to #sapotlokal campaigns post-COVID.

We talked about layoffs and uncertainty, navigating pivots to entrepreneurship, ideas worth building and who to build them with.

So what did we figure out about being Malaysian

One trait many Malaysians share is humble underdoggedness. Humility is a virtue here, but it also creates a massive blind spot. We couldn’t see far into what makes us great and so it was doubly beautiful watching the non-Malaysians in the room remind us of our strengths.

“As an outsider working with Malaysians, I value your cultural insight,” someone said. “Malaysians are fantastic multicultural bridges. What you do so naturally—navigating between cultures with fluency and warmth—is truly a superpower.”

“Malaysians can code-switch effortlessly,” someone else said. “Put us anywhere, and we figure our way out.”

Naz, coming from his Silicon Valley perspective, backed this up: “Living between worlds develops empathy across cultures. That naturally leads to more inclusive design.”

The consensus is we’re not trying to be Western designers who happen to be Malaysian. We’re Malaysian designers whose cultural fluency creates value that others can’t replicate. We don’t have to choose between local and global. Our between-worlds position makes us perfect for this role.

Vulnerability and courage

Did our experiment work? Many times over. The salon format gave people permission to be vulnerable alongside being knowledgeable. Senior practitioners admitted knowledge gaps. Founders talked about fear. Designers share the dilemma of using AI to deepen their craft while risking being made obsolete by it.

“I think I’m missing foundational design knowledge and I want to do something about it,” one designer admitted, with the rest of the room nodding along.

I found this moment particularly moving because it takes courage to admit gaps when everyone expects you to have it all figured out. This was the great collective figuring-out. I enjoyed every bit of it.

How we think about technology and taste

One exchange that stays with me is how we talked about technology and taste. It felt refreshingly grounded instead of panicked or blindly optimistic. There’s a real desire for thoughtful integration here.

The unfortunate reality is that commercialism rewards speed above all else. Designers get praised for assembling interfaces quickly, for churning out converting designs fast. But this creates a trap. When automation arrives, the assemblers are the first to go. Along the way, taste gets lost.

If we look around us, the pattern is glaringly obvious. Websites look the same. Platforms sound the same. Design has become homogenous. Faster, yes. Better? Not always.

We’ve become dependent on pre-built components, reinforcing our role as assemblers rather than creators. We’ve optimised for efficiency at the cost of the very thing that makes our work human—distinctiveness and meaning.

Backstage, Naz talked about inspiration. Not those from Dribbble or Mobbin, where we recycle the same patterns endlessly. But from architecture, from nature, from other mediums and cultural traditions. Originality lives in the spaces between disciplines, where we still get to lean on our curiosity and algorithms haven’t yet flattened everything into sameness.

The irony is that designers who create from first principles often deliver better results faster. Not because they work slowly but because they tap into what makes people feel cared for. When something resonates deeply with users, it succeeds more quickly in the market.

This reminds me of how Sir Jony Ive put it beautifully in his Stripe talk:

“I really do believe that we have this ability to sense care. It’s easy in a service because you confront care, because you confront the person. When it’s vicarious, when it’s via an object, when it’s via a piece of software, it’s more complex. But I think you can sense carelessness. You know carelessness. And so, I think it’s reasonable to believe that you also know care, and you sense care.”

This explains why homogenous design feels hollow. It lacks human intention. When everything looks the same, it’s often because it was optimised for production speed rather than crafted with the person in mind. The result is faster assembly but lower differentiation and substance.

Speed of assembly isn’t the same as speed of success.

The family dimension

Perhaps the most moving moment came when Naz’s 75-year-old mother joined us. Like many Asian parents, she’s never quite understood what her son does with “these Internet things.” Neither does mine!

In Asian families, elders are woven into the fabric of our achievements. But in technology, our accomplishments often exist in languages our elders don’t speak. Watching Naz’s mother see her son command respectful attention from a room full of professionals transformed the evening from a professional gathering into a cultural homecoming.

Between Worlds: where we go from here

Like those early web designers Naz remembers, we’re approaching technology with curiosity rather than fear. We’re building for global markets but celebrating local culture.

Innovation’s future won’t be determined solely in Silicon Valley. It’s being shaped by practitioners who understand that meaningful progress happens between worlds—where Eastern wisdom guides Western technology, where community discourse creates competitive advantage.

This is our distinctive contribution: not choosing between tradition and innovation, but finding harmony between both.

For me, hosting is always a treat in itself. You plan the structure and then let the gathering take its own flow.

By evening’s end, something had shifted. We ran over by 30 minutes, yet nobody looked at their phone except for photos. This felt different.

As I watched Naz’s mother beam with pride, I dare say we’d created something unprecedented: a gathering that honours both individual craft excellence and collective cultural wisdom.

My team and I at Stampede feel deeply grateful we get to create this space for discourse. One Makers at a time, we’re building community that chooses craft over convenience, meaning over metrics, depth over noise.

The future belongs to those who remember that design is both craft and responsibility. We’re just getting started.

—

Next up: The conversation about craft and taste in the age of AI continues at Makers 12 on 27th September. Registration opens soon.

Special thanks to Naz Hamid, UOB Malaysia, my wonderful team at Stampede and every practitioner who made this gathering possible. – Shaza

The post Design, identity and the Malaysian way of seeing with Naz Hamid at Makers Circle appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

What’s fueling Malaysia’s design revolution?

When the team curated this long-due theme for Makers 9, its simple yet powerful message stuck with me. We are designing for Malaysia.

When I started my design journey, the job was making things look good and work well. The canvas was a Photoshop 1024×768 artboard. Today, our canvas is shaping the experiences of our nation. That’s the magnitude of transformation we’re seeing. From government services to businesses and non-profits, design is weaving itself into the very fabric of our lives.

It’s no longer a dream to see government services become genuinely user-friendly. And we could say this because we’re working with the Malaysian government to identify and remedy UX gaps in their digital services. Platforms like Schola are empowering students to explore career paths beyond typical routes. Small businesses, the “makcik and pakcik” shops we all know, are becoming digitally savvy thanks to platforms like Borong.

It was only apt that our theme celebrates Malaysia’s national month and how far we’ve come while reminding us of the work ahead. In his talk Malaysia on the Rise, Khailee Ng of 500 Startups said, Malaysians are not so used to good news. That may be true, but at the same time, we’ve been seeing a quiet revolution happening. Companies are stepping up to better serve their customers, while public agencies are making digital touchpoints more usable and accessible.

This shift is reshaping our nation, and we’re so excited to shine a light on it through Makers 9.

Design: the unsung hero in Malaysia’s glow-up

This transformation isn’t confined to traditional design roles. My own journey has strayed far from the conventional path—my recent work involved crafting a career progression framework, yet it’s still all about design. I see this same spirit in those around me. Our two incredible speakers at Makers 9 don’t carry the “designer” title but embody the essence of designing for Malaysia. Let’s take a look at how they do it.

Linda Rasip: Bringing empathy (and order) to chaos

I’ve known Linda Rasip since she first sought out Stampede for a Malaysian UX agency with global reach. Today, she’s the CTO and co-founder of Borong, a B2B eCommerce platform that empowers small businesses—the very backbone of Malaysia’s economy.

At Makers 9, Linda explained how her team tackled the problem of small businesses struggling to access suppliers in real time. “When designing for Malaysians, you need to anticipate their challenges before they do,” she said.

Borong owed its success in listening, adapting, and understanding Malaysia’s unique business culture. Here’s how they do it:

Empathy first
Linda’s team invests time in understanding local business norms and informal practices. They learn how shop owners manage inventory and understand trust systems in local supply chains so they can identify nuances that matter to Malaysian small businesses.

Build on familiarity
Borong doesn’t impose new processes on its customers. Instead, it complements the way the businesses already operate. This move creates a sense of familiarity, intuitive experience, and confidence, which all lead to trust and ultimately, sticky adoption.

Leverage omnichannel strategies
For seamless digital transformation, Borong ensures businesses can manage orders, update inventories and communicate consistently across various digital and physical touchpoints. This integration means businesses can maintain a cohesive operation, whether online, on social media or in-store.

Design for practical solutions
They introduced features like flexible credit terms and simplified supplier listings. These are real pain points discovered through research, and making them practical turns Borong into a reliable and easy-to-use solution.

When designing for Malaysia, Borong focused on building trust and leaned into cultural insights discovered through user research. To them, the work goes beyond bridging gaps. To be successful in Malaysia and other similar markets, the key is in building lasting relationships.

Yi Fen: Turning career confusion into curiosity and conversations

Then there’s Kong Yi Fen, Product Manager at Schola. Her team at Creador Foundation built a career exploration app to guide Malaysian students, but what happened next was unexpected—Schola went viral, not just among students but adults across the nation.

Everyone, from professionals to industry leaders, was taking career quizzes and sharing their results. (Mine was #budakperform, in case you’re curious.)

Yi Fen’s story began with a simple yet crucial act: listening. “We realized we weren’t asking the right questions,” she shared. Schola’s early days were marked by enthusiastic efforts to address too many problems at once. Through direct conversations with students, teachers, and communities, they narrowed their focus to one key gap: early career exposure. That shift, driven by genuine engagement, led to Schola’s success.

Here’s how Schola made it work:

User research to identify gaps
Yi Fen’s team conducted extensive research to uncover what students and communities truly needed. They listened to students, teachers, and parents closely. As a result, they were able to identify early career exposure as a key area lacking guidance. This insight shaped their product development, ensuring they addressed a real, pressing need.

Focus and adapt
After identifying this gap, the team narrowed their efforts to early career exposure. This focus allowed them to build targeted features, leading to more effective engagement. As a non-profit, this focus exercise allowed them to make the most out of the limited resources they had.

Make it fun and relatable
Schola didn’t just provide career quizzes—they infused local flavor into it! They used familiar slang, playful scenarios and Malaysian cultural references abundantly and this made career exploration feel more like a conversation than an assessment. You could see how it sparked curiosity across ages.

Break it down
Knowing students often hesitated to plan their futures, the app simplified career information into bite-sized, engaging content. Exploring career options is easier and less overwhelming now, and more students are engaging.

Accessible and inclusive to all
Schola’s mission is to make career planning resources free and accessible, reaching students in both urban and rural areas. A key factor in their success is the team’s diversity. With backgrounds in education, tech, finance, and social impact, they bring varied perspectives to the table. This helped them understand different user needs, making sure that the platform remains inclusive, relatable and relevant across demographics.

Schola is an experience that felt authentically Malaysian. But it did so much more than helping students. It sparked dialogue across generations, inspiring everyone to think about career paths with a different lens.

Where do we go from here?

What stood out to me during Makers 9 wasn’t just the impressive platforms or clever solutions. It was the optimism—the shared sense of hope for what design can achieve here.

We are a nation of talents, from tech innovators to local entrepreneurs, all united by the desire to make things better, clearer and more accessible. And every step forward counts.

We’re also on the cusp of something big. Design is no longer an afterthought. It’s now becoming the backbone of how we solve problems in Malaysia. Whether it’s transforming how students plan their futures or streamlining how businesses connect, design is driving real change.

Empathy is at the heart of driving Malaysia forward. We could do it by engaging directly with users—we listen, observe and understand their needs. We could use our local insights to craft solutions that truly resonate, and we build trust by anticipating their challenges.

Malaysians are highly collaborative by nature, so this part is natural but key for us. Partnering with developers, marketers and educators brings diverse perspectives, sparking innovation. We could focus on making our digital platforms simple and accessible so that they work for everyone. Then, we must share our insights and connect within our communities to amplify this impact so that together, we create a network that orients towards positive, lasting change.

Small steps. Big difference.

How do we play a part in this transformation?

Designing for Malaysia starts with understanding its unique blend of challenges and strengths.

This is a process that goes beyond how things look. We’re reaching deeper to address our people’s needs in ways that feel authentic and meaningful.

To do that, we must start by recognising what makes us unique.

The Malaysian flavour

Take Malaysia’s diversity. We’re a blend of cultures, languages, and traditions, each adding richness to our shared experience. This mix shapes how we interact, learn, and connect. It calls for design that is flexible, inclusive, and deeply attuned to these nuances, ensuring solutions that resonate across communities.

One key to designing digital platforms for Malaysia is supporting its multilingual culture. With Malay, Chinese, Tamil, and English speakers, robust multi-language features are essential for inclusivity.

Inclusive design also means understanding local nuances—catering to varied digital literacy with simple, clear interfaces and localised payment options.

Malaysian consumers are distinct in their digital behaviour, especially on mobile. Smartphones are the go-to device for browsing, shopping, and staying connected, so platforms need to be mobile-first. Convenience is key too—fast loading, intuitive navigation, and localised payment options like FPX and GrabPay make all the difference.

Trust plays a huge role here too. Clear privacy policies, secure transactions and visible customer support build confidence. Social proof matters too; user reviews and ratings often guide decisions, as Malaysians seek reassurance before purchasing.

Throughout Makers 9, we heard stories that proved how thoughtful design can lead to real change. Each speaker showed us the impact of listening, adapting, and building with empathy.

This is Design that connects—where every detail matters, and every choice makes a difference. It’s a reminder that when design is done right, it has the power to transform communities.

Building bridges, not only platforms

Makers 9 wouldn’t have been the same without the support of UOB. From the start, William, Sean and the entire UOB team turned their venue into more than just a space—it felt like Makers’ home for the day. We truly appreciate their hospitality and the care they took to make everything seamless.

We’ve had partners and friends from Seek, Setel, Mercedes Benz and Grab Digital Bank joining us too, exchanging insights and deepening connections. Conversations went beyond the usual, diving into how we can collaborate more meaningfully, understand their challenges, and build solutions together.

And to our volunteers—Sandra, Faiq, and Fatimah Aliaa—thank you. Your energy, kindness, and behind-the-scenes support made Makers 9 an extra special one for us.

A community is not an event, but a movement

Makers 9 felt like a reunion of dreamers, doers, and everyone in between. With over 100 attendees on a wet Saturday morning, we had an overflow of ideas and collaborations that didn’t just end when the UOB’s beautiful hall lights dimmed.

I’m certain that the seeds planted here will continue to grow and lead to more impact on our own home turf.

To all who attended, contributed, and shared their stories, terima kasih!

We’re not just designing for Malaysia—we’re designing Malaysia. Here’s to even bigger and better things at Makers 10.

Join us in designing Malaysia!

If you want to be part of the team that is designing Malaysia, we’re looking for specific people who can take us further! Come join our rank.

The post Malaysia’s quiet design revolution at Makers 9 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Throughout most of 2023, we’ve been curious about our role as designers and makers when the world needs us to go beyond the confines of our craft. This is us living in a house, one day looking at the ceiling and thinking “I wonder if it can go higher than that?”.

The ceiling is our perceived limit of roles and definition of design. The future will happen with or without designers; if we want to be an active part of it, we need to raise the ceiling.

In this edition, we look to extend these conversations from inside Stampede outward.

But first, the polls!

As participants started arriving, we wanted to take the temperature of the room, so Qi, the moderator, kicked things off with a quick poll.

We learned several interesting things about our fellow designers:

• People feel mostly hopeful and confident about their role as designers, but a few are worried.
• An overwhelming majority feel psychologically safe in their current team – fantastic sign!
• The majority who joined are beginners in design advocacy, which probably explains why the Design Advocacy breakout room garnered the most interest.

Asking Big Questions

In this talk, I shared my macro and micro reflections on the state of design in 2023. Here are a few big questions I had in my design journey.

On designing in the era of automation and AI

Are designers being made redundant by automation? For low-level pixel pushing function, or derivative design using components from a library that can be automated, perhaps. But it is also an invitation to look at how designers can influence the human-AI experience. To do this, we must cultivate future-ready designers who are explorer-builders, emboldened and trans-disciplinary, who dare to push forth the meaning of interface beyond screens.

We must also be responsible for our creation. We’ve been mostly thinking short-term in product validation. Assessment of the long-term hedonic value of designed experiences and occupational stress resulting from workplace digitalisation and automation must enter our vocabulary if we are to be proponents of inclusive design.

On design relevancy and value

All around us, designers are being advised that we need to prove our value. What is unique about design that we need to do so when other disciplines like engineering don’t? In answering this, I found that the problem with design is its value manifests not within the design team itself, but in other business-critical areas.

Consider that if the design does its job well, the value is not measured in the number of Figma components inserts or interfaces we generate. The value design brings is in how we improve product conversion, increase customer success and satisfaction, and improve the speed and consistency of interface implementation for developers. So the value of design is real and all-affecting, only not within our discipline itself and not always in the short term. But remove a designer today, and the cost of servicing the design debt will become overwhelming real quickly.

On design quality

Designers are often seen as sufferers of process pedanticism. We’re guilty of following closely our process and taking the time necessary to maintain the integrity and quality of our work, often at the expense of moving fast and breaking things. On the other hand, the process is instrumental in focusing well before speeding up so we can attack problems smarter and with cost-effective precision. Therefore, the design process and innovation progress are not at odds with each other but should co-exist.

On design leadership and being good human beings to each other

We designers over-extend empathy to our users, collaborators and stakeholders, but we often forget to use it with each other. As leaders, we spend so much time being the shit umbrella that we sometimes forget to sow and nurture the ground under us so people can thrive. Care is a positive workplace currency, but those who care most passionately are often the first to burn out. As leaders, we need to ask our people and ourselves how to become better support systems for each other.

The shift from learning to making opportunities

Makers are inherent learners, though sometimes we could fall into the trap of learning without actually doing it or waiting for opportunities to arrive without creating them.

Four of our designers shared their observations and reflections on the shift they had to make in 2023.

On design advocacy, Mai Sarah shared her experience inviting non-designers into usability testing and product ideation sessions. When design is open and made visible to others, we start seeing a proliferation of design enthusiasts and allies, as Azim found in WUC. His conversations with others in WUC not only led him to new collaborative ventures but also exposed him to the breadth and depth of the UX field.

Reflecting on Eric Snowden’s wisdom, the VP of Design at Adobe, we highlighted the importance of empathy towards our teammates, beyond our users. Recognizing empathy as a crucial element for creating a sense of safety, Adiel advocated for some ways to foster psychological safety within a team. These include practicing open communication, seeking feedback regularly, and placing trust in the capabilities of the team.

We also talked about building a future-proof team, Hidayu shared her key takeaways from the Design Leaders conference, emphasizing the need to shift the design conversation from solving issues to understanding the real problem first. Building a future-proof team also means we need to be inclusive of other disciplines, leveraging new perspectives to reach our common goal, and ultimately raising the ceiling of our profession.

The after-party experiment

Every online event feels unceremoniously cut short and awkward at the end. The host said bye. People turned on their webcam for a split second to wave to everyone. Everyone then tried to hit the Leave Meeting button while maintaining that awkward smile.

We have come a long way with online events, yet the solution to this sudden withdrawal remains elusive.

The topics we chose this time were big – each could be its own Makers theme. As we looked for ways to get people to delve, expand, and connect over them meaningfully, it became clearer that an experiment was in order.

We figured nothing beats genuine connection around a topic you’re passionate about. What happens if we create intentional spaces for people to connect deeper around things they care about? Can we do that remotely?

We launched five after-party conversations, discussing big themes like growing future-ready design teams, amplifying design value, psychological safety, and stretching our craft’s breadth and depth. Our design apprentices, from various non-design backgrounds, also hosted their conversations on fusing old craft and new.

Despite the initial tech hiccup (because of Murphy’s Law), people stayed long into the night, conversing and sharing their takes so that together, we could move the industry into the future.

This is the very spirit of Stampede Makers.

— A massive thank you to everyone who made Makers more special with every edition. If you want to join Makers #7 in February, likely in person, watch our social media posts.

The post Raising the Ceiling of Design in Malaysia at Makers 6 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Last Friday (25th November 2016) marked the first time Stampede got together, physically at one place, and at the same time. If you didn’t know already, we at Stampede work remotely from various places around Malaysia along with other parts of the world. For instance, we have Viki from Hungary and Tony from Indonesia. Both flew down to KL just for this meet-up.

While we have met Tony before when he flew down last year, this marks the first time we were meeting Viki in person. She flew all the way from Budapest to meet us.

Viki arrives in Malaysia!

The reason for this get-together was to attend the JomLaunch 4 in Kuala Lumpur along with having Stampede-related meetings and just plain having fun together. Stampede was invited to JomLaunch 4 because of the voluntary work we did for the JomLaunch team. We designed and build the entire website.

The first thing we did as a team was to have dinner, which we did at Bangsar, KL. We ordered a variety of dishes and everyone dug in to their heart’s content. The tom yam soup was particularly good.

Stampede Dinner with Thai Food!

Once we had our fill, we proceeded to the condo that Shaza booked for us via Airbnb. This location was in the heart of KL and you could see some great sights at the height we were at, floor 41. We dropped off our luggage and got the needed rest for the following day’s event.

One the highlights of that night were the fresh shrimps that Iwan caught himself and prepared for us. You won’t find it any fresher and more delicious than this. It was definitely a great snack to have to produce great dreams that night.

Fresh cooked shrimps by Chef Iwan / Viki taking that honorary food pic

Event day, JomLaunch 4

Saturday happened, and we woke up extra early so that we could get first pick of our seats before the crowd moved in. The sun rose earlier that day and we could see it glowing behind the tall buildings of the city. It was a great sight.

We woke up to this the next morning!

Hopping into two separate vehicles we arrived at the venue earlier than expected. The event staff were still setting up so we had a moment for a quick breather to look around. When the event opened, there was an influx of people getting themselves registered to collect their goodie bags. We noticed that the JomLaunch team had their hands full, so we decided to help them out for a bit.

Shaza & Viki helping out at the reception

Once the crowd had finished moving into the event hall, we followed suit and took our seats. Here’s a quick explanation on what JomLaunch is about. It is an event where participants showcase their awesome ICT (information and communications technology) idea. This can be an explanation of how their system works but most participants brought working prototypes to the event itself. Some of these were ready for public usage. In total, this year JomLaunch 4 had 18 participants. The event started at 8.30 AM and completed by 5.30 PM.

The crowd at JomLaunch 4. Can you spot the Stampede team?

The presentations from each team varied from malware protection to a 3D education game. Here’s a list of what was presented during JomLaunch 4.

1. Eraxen Endpoint Protection – malware protection
2. MMS – motorsport / cub management system
3. RunCloud.io – competitor to ServerPilot.my
4. Bytetuta – AI bot for muslim lifestyle
5. Mytix – venue ticket sales management
6. MyClinic2U – clinic management
7. Ninja iDempiere – plugin for Idempiere
8. Splate – Laravel SaaS boilerplate
9. Soding – talent search and headhunting
10. WhatsTivity – social media platform
11. Telebuzz – telegram bot
12. CerdikApp – communication and monitoring tools for students, parents and teachers
13. MInD Automated Vehicle (MAV) – automated guided vehicle (manufacturing)
14. RobotJualan.com – bot for sales
15. EksploRazi – 3D education game
16. Terapi.my – Uber for home spa service
17. GO.my  – travel assistant
18. HireMe.my – platform to build and share resumes

In the end, the event was a success with every participant getting their time to showcase their ideas. The winner of this year’s JomLaunch was RunCloud.io who’s team built a platform for easy server setup. They were awarded RM 1,000 in the form of a check.

Meeting people

Another thing we like to do at these events is to meet up with other people from the industry. After a year or two, you’ll start to recognize many individuals, start-up founders and their key team members. Sometimes we bump into people who are fond of the work we do and want to get to know us better.

This is Fachrul (left), who got us together for a wefie

It’s really great to know we’re appreciated for the work we do as we put a lot of effort, thought and heart into our work culture.

Close-knit community

It never ceases to surprise us how close-knit the JomLaunch community is. The presentations of each team were well thought off and presented rather casually. This can be seen in the past 3 JomLaunches as well. The organizers did their best to brighten the atmosphere by inserting a joke or two in-between presentations. As the day was a long one, many present were feeling tired at the end of the day, but those jokes helped perk them up again.

Serious vs Freestyle

The closing night

After the event was over, we were very hungry and on our way to dinner. That was when the JomLaunch team caught us off-guard by inviting us out for steamboat. We replenished our tummies and shared a bunch of conversations with one another. Thanks JomLaunch, we look forward to what’s in store for next year!

JomLaunch and Stampede having an awesome dinner

The post Stampede Get-together & JomLaunch 4 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Stampede beraya at Casa de Shaiful

At Stampede, during one of our Blitz (scrum) sessions, we threw a question that we can all relate to. It’s about each and everyone’s most favourite and memorable Hari Raya memory.

What is your best Hari Raya memory?

Here’s what the team had to say

Iwan

For me, the best Hari Raya memory was from last year (2015). Before this I would only go back to my hometown, but now that I’m married, I get to start celebrating with two families. It is a new experience for me because now I need to decide which kampung I need to visit first. This also means I get to eat twice as much and can get to savor both Negeri Sembilan and Ipoh cuisine. My wife’s family are ethnic Banjar people so the food they serve is very unique to me, while my side makes the best rendang. Last Raya was also very memorable because my wife was pregnant at the time so many people came to visit.

Shaiful

My best Hari Raya memory last year in 2015. My family organized an open house, because my grandparents are not around anymore so there’s no place to ‘balik kampung’. The turnout was huge, with about 12 families attending the invitation. The guests contributed to some of the food and brought their own specialties to be shared.

Then there were also some crazy scenes happening when the kids got together. One of them just strolled into my room and picked up my ukelele and started jamming.

I think the biggest highlight of that Raya was the barbecue setup, using a big burner and set up at the porch of my house. Having a barbecue pit is very unique during Hari Raya. Then there were also some crazy scenes happening when the kids got together. One of them just strolled into my room and picked up my ukelele and started jamming. After that they went on to the playground.

Shaza

In Malaysia, Hari Raya is often celebrated by traveling back to your hometown—this mass exodus is called “Balik Kampung” (translation: going back home to the village). My parents have called Ipoh town home for many years and yet when Raya beckons, we will always look forward fondly to Balik Kampung to my grandmother’s house, a small village in Batu Kikir, Negeri Sembilan. As Malaysia gets more urbanized, Balik Kampung could also mean going back home to wherever home is, cities, towns and villages alike.

When I was a child, my parents couldn’t afford to make the trip and celebrate Hari Raya with their family every year. At one time, I remember we didn’t go back for 3 years. So this made Balik Kampung something to look forward to. I remember us taking the rickshaw from our house in Kuala Terengganu to the bus terminal, followed by a bus ride to the Kuantan terminal by the river, an exchange to yet another bus onwards to Negeri Sembilan, disembarking at a small stop by the roadside and walking down the village road for another 2 kilometers (not easy with three children and massive luggage) before finally greeted by the excited shrieks of my aunties and uncles.

Raya food and popping zombies—that’s the dream.

My grandmother has gone for a few years now, but we still honour her memory and family tradition by celebrating Hari Raya together. One of the fondest memories I have of Hari Raya recently was playing Left 4 Dead in a LAN party with my siblings at the Raya table, surrounded by lemang, ketupat and laksa, with my dad checking in every so often to replenish his supplies of “Kuih Raya” (specialty raya cookies that truthfully, all tastes the same).

Raya food and popping zombies—that’s the dream. Anyone game this raya, look me up on Steam.

Zana

My father would occasionally join us in his sarong and fire ‘meriam’ (bamboo cannon) with the older cousins.

My fondest and best memory of Raya was when I was around 7 years old. During that time we would go back to my grandmother’s kampung. Once there all the cousins would get together to play with fireworks. It was cute because the smaller cousins would play with ‘Pop Pop’ (small firecrackers), while the older ones would play with larger fireworks. With such a variety, all sorts of sounds could be heard with everyone playing. My father would occasionally join us in sarong and fire ‘meriam’ (bamboo cannon) with the older cousins. Another thing about Raya is collecting ‘Duit Raya’ from the adults which we would soon spend on buying sweets.

Tony

For me, the best and most memorable Hari Raya was the time just after Nauly (my daughter) was born. She came into my life during the fasting period before Eid. That Raya was not like the other times because the neighbors would come over to visit and be excited over Nauly. It was a great combination of becoming a dad and getting together with friends and family.

Hakim

I can’t recall a particular Raya that is the best. During that time I would visit family and friends, eat great food and getting some well needed rest after a month of fasting. Then at night, I’d hang out with my friends and watch football somewhere. One thing I do look forward to during this season is my grandmother’s cooking, as she makes the best Soto. Don’t just take it from me, my friends also love savoring her cooking.

What about you?

So what’s your favourite Hari Raya Memory? Share one of your best moments about this holiday with us below in the comment section. You’ll also be able to see what we’re up to this Raya on our Instagram and Facebook channels, so be sure to check that out too.

The team at Stampede wishes everyone a blessed Eid and Selamat Hari Raya, Maaf Zahir Batin. Enjoy your holidays and make even more great memories!

The post Our Best Hari Raya Memories! appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

You really need make sure the product principles are right from the start.

User Experience, as we all know inherently sits at the nexus of Development, Design, Marketing, Business and Leadership in a business – and we could couldn’t help wondering where UX fits in startups life. It is necessary, but UX research and processes do take time, and startups daily life tend to be very hectic to give room to these exercises.

Who better to speak to than Linda Rasip, CTO of Aleph One as well as a good friend of ours. With about 15 years of experience under her belt, she’s worked on different platforms like Joota.com (social content curating platform), Halal Speed Dating, Purelyb, iResidenz and Jooblii (an e-commerce site).

Linda and her Joota team in the early years!

Having to address many technical and user challenges pertaining to infrastructure and development, Linda is perpetually positive and fascinated by the endless changes that the industry often goes through, and she enjoys the process and challenge of learning new things.

We decide we should take the taxi to her house and pick on her brain.

We thank Linda for her time and her invaluable insights about practicing UX in startups. If you would like to speak to her, you may contact her through email or Facebook.

(P/s: Linda is also nominated as one of the Developer Heroes in Rice Bowl Awards – vote for her!)

The post UX and Startups: An Interview with Linda Rasip appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Starting with remote made the journey possible for Katsana. Give your team flexibility. Results are what truly matters.

Aware of this, it gave Syed Ahmad Fuqaha, or Fuqaha for short, to come up with the idea for Katsana, a startup that offers GPS tracking and fuel monitoring systems for vehicles, complete with data analytics capabilities. Basically, users are able to track the location of their vehicles through smartphones and ensure their safety.

The former project manager for JomSocial co-founded Katsana with colleague Mohd Irwan Ibrahim, after they both left the company. Commercially launched in 2014 mainly targeting enterprises, Katsana started ambitious yet humble, remotely.

We speak to Fuqaha, who arrived for the Skype video call very animatedly — about his remote working setup, his work ethics and many more.

The post Journey Made Possible: An Interview with Syed Ahmad Fuqaha appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

#rayasquadgoals

At Stampede we have our daily scrum meeting at 2 pm, of which we called The Blitz, where we update what had we been working on and our plans for the day as well as some harmless banters after that. It got us talking to how excited we are about Hari Raya, so I decided to throw a quick question,

What does Hari Raya mean to you?

Shaiful is looking forward to have Kuala Lumpur to himself

“Being born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, I am pretty much a city boy – also because my grandparents are no longer around, so I don’t really get the chance to celebrate Hari Raya in kampung. When most people go back kampung (going back to their hometowns), I look forward to empty roads and a more chill KL. Generally, my friends and families would visit each other in each other’s houses, catching up and stuff.

Another thing I really look forward to is our tradition of having open houses for the whole month of Syawal!”

Iwan is elated to spend Hari Raya in two kampungs

“This is my first year of marriage, so I get to experience the unspoken concern of deciding which kampung to spend in like other married couples do. Luckily, my wife’s family and mine live very close to each other, so we get to visit each other’s family as often as we could during the Hari Raya break.

Also, it’s good to meet friends and catch up, and get some break from work. Looking forward to come back to the office all recuperated.”

Dahlia plans to eat all day long

(I asked if she wants to change her answer, she replied with a firm, “no”.)

Shaza is grateful to have enough – and KFC!

“Me and Dov are not very particular in celebrating Hari Raya, mostly because every Hari Raya we would go back to my mother’s kampung in Negeri Sembilan. We are a big family, and have to meet every family members from all ages, so we have to socialise a lot. It is also the time of the year to meet my siblings face to face. Although we talk to each other a lot, my siblings and I live all over Malaysia – so it was fun to meet them again and bully each other, sometimes joined by my parents who are just as comical as we are.

Also, another thing you must know – my family and I have this unspoken tradition. On the night of second Raya, after all the food is finished no matter how much they were cooked, we would all huddle up together in a car, bantering over who squashed whom and went ahead to queue with the whole town to buy KFC bucket meals to share with the whole family.

Hari Raya also taught me to be grateful for what I have – and if I have more than that, then it’s a bonus. I think that’s how the world should work for everyone.

Being an introvert, usually I need a few days to recuperate after coming back to Langkawi after Hari Raya break.

Also, only on Hari Raya we get to see Dov in baju melayu, even only for a few hours in between Hari Raya prayer. It’s actually a rare sight!”

Zana is just happy to catch up with family

“I am an only child, but ever since I was small I had been very close to my cousins. Now that we are all grown up, where most of my cousins are all scattered around Malaysia due to family and career obligation, it is about the time of the year we get to meet each other again and catch up.

I think Hari Raya is the day when my mother is the happiest because she gets to spend so much time with family. So seeing her happy makes me happy – although that would probably mean sometimes I have to roll on the carpet in my baju kurung throwing a tantrum, “When do we get to go home?!” after she had uttered goodbyes but still been chatting with the relatives for yet another hour at least.

Also, I love it that I get to dress up 😉 And yes, echoing Dahlia, FOOD!”

What about you?

What does Raya mean to you? The comment section is all open for you – and if you want to echo my and Dahlia’s sentiment about food, oh yes feel free to!

With that in note, we at Stampede would like to wish everyone a blessed Eid and Selamat Hari Raya Maaf Zahir Batin. Enjoy your holidays, go easy on the food binge, and come back from the holidays all refreshed!

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