How we won GOJEK’s internal hackathon
On Dec 5, 2018, GoJek hosted an internal hackathon at Bangalore office and Team ⚡️(me and three others) won the second price with our new product GO-Calendar.
About GO-JEK
Established in 2010 as a motorcycle ride-hailing phone service in Indonesia, GO-JEK has since evolved to provide on-demand transport and lifestyle services that move the city.
The Idea
Making Go-Jek super smart app.
Gojek has 18 products which make it a super app, what if we make it smart by serving a personalized experience to the user. Achieving the personalized experience is not an easy task but user always choose convenience over privacy by giving access to their data like push notification, mail, calendar etc. so we decided to study the user behavior and suggest appropriate service like Go-Ride every morning to office and Go-Food at lunch and Go-Send to send a gift to loved once on their birthday.
It also solves the following problems
- Recurring events.
- Reminder for important events (paying a premium or recharging talk time).
Challenges
Building an algorithm which understands user behavior and Processing data requires expertise in data science and machine learning but these are clearly not our strength.
Solution
What if users themselves schedule calendar events with services based on his/her requirements. like booking a Go-Ride to the office/home or order Go-Food for lunch. Go-Bill for monthly bills and likewise.
Time to Hack
The venue was filled with 35 teams, 100 engineers and a lot of discussions so we choose one of the meeting room as our battleground and started the brainstorming. As we have good knowledge of the product, its flows and iOS code base we decide to add Go-Calender as a new product on GoJek iOS app’s home screen. Yes even though we were building event scheduler we still call it as a calendar because it serves as a platform to Go-Jek’s services.

Product flow


After a couple of iterations, we come up with the flow that doesn’t even require any Backend effort (apart from push notification service ). this is how flow looks
- Open Go-Calender
- Add an event by choosing a service (Go-Ride, Go-Send)
- Create a booking and schedule it.
That’s it, the user will receive a push notification at the scheduled time click it to make a booking. Simple and a life saver.
Presentation
We presented a fulling working product with full vision in terms of business use case, like
- The product will help us understand user behavior.
- It will help retain user as it saves the user time and helps them become organized.
- It will be a new entry point for other products.
Prizes
We got awesome JBL Pulse 3 as a prize and we love it.

Team ⚡️

📝 Read this story later in Journal.
🗞 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy Tech stories, opinions, and news waiting in your inbox: Get the noteworthy newsletter >