Building Products for 46M Users and Counting: Philipp (Grab)
CPO @ Grab
Philipp Kandal is the Chief Product Officer of Grab, Southeast Asia’s largest superapp and one of the region’s most iconic tech companies - serving 46M monthly transacting users. Yet as he points out, that’s still just 6% of the region’s population. In his view, Grab’s journey is only getting started.
In this conversation with Evolving Edge, Philipp shares how Grab balances hyper-local nuances with regional scale, why empathy and accessibility drive its product philosophy, and what “AI-first with heart” means in practice.
Q: Let’s start with your journey. How did you end up in Singapore and with Grab?
Philipp: I previously founded a startup in Europe focused on maps, which was later acquired by a Silicon Valley company. While on a stopover in Singapore, I met a friend working at Grab. Over a beer, he told me about the huge challenges they were facing with maps. I wasn’t looking for a job - I was actually about to start another startup - but decided to extend my stay for a day to see if I could help.
Long story short: six months later, I joined Grab, moved from San Francisco to Singapore, and never looked back. The problems here were so unique and impactful, it was impossible to resist.
Q: Grab is one of the few platforms that has truly scaled across such a fragmented region. From a product perspective, what’s the framework you use to navigate that complexity?
Philipp: We often talk about our 80–20 approach. About 80% of our platform is consistent across the region, but the remaining 20% is tailored to local nuances - from payment preferences to cultural habits.
It always comes back to our mission. We’re here to uplift people - whether that’s helping a driver earn more, enabling a small merchant’s business to grow, or giving a family better mobility options. So, our product philosophy is simple: make technology accessible and sustainable. That means building products people love, while ensuring the unit economics make sense too.
We want to take technology we think is transformative and make it more accessible because - for example - drivers in Jakarta may not have the same access to expensive smartphones as drivers in the U.S. It’s important that our products suit and are designed for our users’ practical needs and circumstances.
Generally, if a product is accessible, sticky, and economically viable, we know we have a winner. We consider this through two lenses: adoption (do people love and find value in the products we build?) and sustainability (do the unit economics work well enough for us to scale this?). We track engagement through adoption curves, repeat usage, and word-of-mouth virality, while sustainability requires that unit economics make sense for both Grab and our partners.
New features like Family Accounts - designed for Southeast Asia’s broader family structures - have scaled quickly, for example, because these conditions are being met.
Q: You’ve led product and engineering teams globally. What’s different about building in Southeast Asia versus the Valley?
Philipp: The talent here is outstanding - the bar we’ve set is no different from somewhere like Silicon Valley. We have R&D centres in 4 Southeast Asian cities and the vast majority of our tech talent are locals based region-wide, so they have lived experience and understand the region deeply. Our teams are international, so perspectives are diverse. We also have talent based in hubs like Romania, Bangalore and China, so we can recruit the best talent available, wherever they are based.
Empathy is especially critical in Southeast Asia. In contrast, in the Valley, teams often model products after themselves. That makes sense if you’re building, say, an AI coding assistant. For us, it’s crucial that we immerse ourselves in what our users experience, in order to build products that really serve their needs. It’s why, when I visited Vietnam a few weeks ago, my team and I spent hours with drivers to understand how our products can serve them better.
We spend a lot of time on the ground - riding with drivers, talking to merchants - to really understand their challenges. That level of immersion is a core skill for product builders in this region.
Q: Grab talks about being “AI-first with heart.” What does that mean in practice?
Philipp: “AI-first” reflects our deep belief that AI is hugely transformative. With every product we build, we must consider how it fits within an AI-powered world. We even run AI sprints internally so that teams can focus solely on experimenting with and exploring AI use cases for a dedicated period, like we did for a few weeks last month.
The “with heart” part is just as important. It means solving real user problems and making AI accessible to people who otherwise might never be able to use advanced technology.
Two examples I love, which solve real pain points for our merchant- and driver-partners:
Merchant AI Assistant: A “virtual COO” for small businesses on our platform. It analyzes the merchant data on our platform, from sales data to customer reviews and gives merchants tailored advice, like which menu items to add or promos to run. It offers advice based on contextual information from data within our ecosystem, as opposed to generic advice.
Driver Voice Reporting: Drivers in Southeast Asia are very community-oriented. They like to share information with each other about road conditions. So, we developed a Voice Reporting which allows drivers to share road updates about things like flooding or road blockages. This has massively increased feedback sharing, improving traffic predictions and ETAs across the platform, improving the experience for all our drivers.
Q: Beyond AI, how do you approach frontier technologies like autonomous vehicles that require ecosystem readiness?
Philipp: We’re very excited about AVs, but our guiding question is always: how do we make sure technology is accessible, safe and inclusive in Southeast Asia?
First, we think about what obstacles must be addressed in order to bring new technology to customers. That’s why we’ve signed partnerships with players including WeRide to look closely at what things like Southeast Asia’s traffic conditions, regulations, and infrastructure could mean for a more autonomous future. Ensuring driver and passenger safety will be paramount, as well as how we can support drivers in a rapidly changing environment.
I always think that constraints force us to be more creative. Take how we set out to map Southeast Asia, for example. The expensive cost of mapping rigs was holding us back from scaling up our mapping efforts. So, we built our own low-cost mapping hardware which we distributed to our drivers, who could help us map the region while on the road. This let us map Southeast Asia at a fraction of the cost, turning unit economic constraints into an opportunity.
Ultimately, whether it’s AVs, AI, or maps, our goal is the same: improve as many lives as possible by making technology usable, affordable, and human-centered. We never develop technology just for its own sake.