Overview: My work at Tiki
A walkthrough of my experience designing B2B and internal products, with special attention to Tiki—where I had my longest tenure and most significant impact.
Background
Tiki was a fast-growing, local e-commerce startup, with a strong potential taking over the places of the leading foreign competitors (Shopee, Lazada).
Tiki: e-marketplace
Tiki was a soonicorn startup and, by 2022, the 3rd biggest e-marketplace platform in Vietnam. Tiki generated over 200 millions USD/year. Tiki Retail business contributed to the majority of Tiki revenue.
Vietnamese ecommerce startup Tiki nears unicorn status after raising $240 million in Series E round. Link
Tiki business structure
At the time, Tiki had just secured major investment and was scaling rapidly to capture market share. This growth brought operational challenges: we needed to handle exponentially more SKUs, suppliers, orders, data, etc. Many critical processes were fragmented across manual workflows and disconnected systems, urgently needed to be centralized and automated.
What we did
Between 2021–2023, our team launched 20+ major tools for the Retail business. Some of the most impactful work included:
Inventory
Centralize the supply chain process
Before our team, different phases of supply planning were managed via Excel files. Many calculations and data management were done manually and in silo, bringing risks of errors, inconsistencies, and limited transparency.
We built a centralized platform with:
Semi-automated Demand forecasting and supply planning.
Intelligent inventory replenishment recommendations.
Supplier
Enhance communication between Tiki and suppliers
Much more advanced Order Management platform, with automated validations and semi-automated order placing using inputs from…
Newly built Contract management and Supplier performance modules.
And other upstream systems.
Pricing
Automate pricing decisions
Price intelligence: automatically crawled competitor prices and alerted teams when Tiki's prices were uncompetitive.
Auto-pricing and Price optimization: ML-powered tool that dynamically adjusted prices within predefined constraints or criteria.
Other price-related tools: Rebate, promotion, etc.
Tiki design team was a centralized team with over 20 members. Besides designers who were assigned to different squads, we also had different roles in the team such as UX researcher, UX writer, Illustrators and Design Ops.
Within the big design team we were also divided into smaller groups such as Consumer, Business (which includes 1P (mine) and 3P), and many other platforms.
There is another junior designer working alongside with me in Retail IQ (1P).
Tiki design team
Not all images are from Tiki but from other companies as well, as I didn't have the habit of taking pictures during work (I should have 😭). But I hope this anyway gave you a rough idea about how we worked together.
Within Retail IQ team, designer roles expanded to even before PRDs are formed.
Step 1
We received some requirements are priorities from business sides (top down via documents or meetings).
Or we receive requirements directly from our users (through meetings (internal users), user interviews, CSAT surveys, log data, etc.)
Our Retail team was able to establish a monthly user study routine (user interview) to ensure the team maintained continuous user feedback and insights.
Step 1.2
Here PMs will gather all the needs, restructure them and organize them into the roadmap. We plan financial-yearly roadmap but we keep refining the plan every quarter.
If there are urgent needs, issues, or new priorities, we would try to adhoc-ly adapt to the actual situations.
Requirements collected from user test and survey results (first 3 images); A requirement document from business team (image 4); Our periodical user interview findings are sorted using Eisenhower Matrix (image 5).
Step 2
PMs and I form a rough idea of how the product works in the form of user flows, and/or document with questions + rough answers, and/or quick sketches.
The output document at this stage is the early versions of the PRD. Product context and goals are defined first as a design compass. Success metrics are also defined along the way as the product idea is formed.
We like defining the product concept using Q&A format (Amazon-style Working Backwards).
Step 3
After we have an aligned direction for the product, we part way to work individually on the PRD (PMs) and UI design (me) in more details.
At this stage, I worked mostly independently but stayed in close contact with the PM. As design and logic were closely connected, many details changed along the way. Some ideas that seemed clear in early discussions turned out differently once visualized, so we often had to revisit and refine them together.
3.1. Wireframes based on step 2 inputs
↓
3.2. Hi-fi wireframes, exploring different UI options.
During this stage, to come up with the designs, I may also need to do additional activities (Data hierarchy ranking, align new design system components, etc.). More detailed information about design process can be seen in Demand Forecast and Rebate Management projects.
Step 4
After the UI design is finalized, if there is any component needed to be added or adjusted, I will need to follow the design system process established by our Design Ops team.
Step 5
Following steps are basically similar to the Design team's process: design hand-off to dev; Follow up on jira tickets and perform QC before the products/features are deployed; etc.
And of course, the process is iterative!
Design hand-off file.
For Tiki business platforms' design system, we use Ant Design as a base with further customization based on our needs.
At Be Group, a company I joined after Tiki, I also worked with a more advanced design systems with documentation & tokens management included.
Besides Retail IQ
In my final six months at Tiki, the company faced significant challenges as market conditions shifted. During this period of uncertainty and resource constraints, I became the sole designer supporting the entire Business Platforms team—working across another four different squads, while continuing my work in Retail IQ.
Seller Center
I took on several modules for the Seller Center platform, where we provided marketplace sellers with tools to manage their stores. This included expanding our Price Intelligence tool to external sellers and taking ownership of the entire platform for six months, contributing to projects like Seller Performance, Fulfillment by Tiki, and multi-channel delivery services.
New business platforms
I also helped expand Tiki's internal Business Platform, transitioning critical workflows—contract management, payment requests—from third-party tools to our own centralized system.
What this period taught me
Working as a solo designer across multiple teams during a challenging time stretched me in ways I hadn't experienced before. I learned to prioritize ruthlessly, adapt quickly, and deliver impact even with limited resources.
From a UX perspective, I learned to make strategic trade-offs—understanding when thorough user research was essential versus when we needed to move fast with validated patterns. I became better at advocating for users while being realistic about constraints, and developed a sharper sense for which design decisions would drive real business impact versus nice-to-haves. While demanding, this period taught me to think like a business partner, balancing user needs with business urgency.
Looking back
Looking back at my time at Tiki, I'm proud of what our team accomplished—20+ tools that genuinely improved how the business operated. But more than the output, I value the process: learning to balance business needs with user needs, collaborating across disciplines, and iterating based on real feedback.
Tiki was, in many ways, a dream workplace for any designer—a company that valued user research, gave designers real influence in shaping products, and fostered a culture where experimentation and learning were encouraged. It set a high bar for what a healthy design culture looks like, and it's the kind of environment I'm looking to find again as I explore new opportunities.
And yes, it's also where I made some great friends along the way :).
If you'd like to see more details about specific projects, check out below.