I’m Grab’s head of product marketing. Here’s a day in my life.

Day in the Life is a series where personalities in the Asian tech community recount what they do on a typical day. Read more from the series here.

Hi, I’m Kaia Lai. I head product marketing at Grab, and I also co-lead our consumer experience team.

In these roles, I am sometimes the voice of the customer, advocating for them in the product development process and crafting product narratives that they resonate with. At other times, I represent the voice of the business, helping to shape the strategy for our overall app experience and making sure the entire tech family is aligned with it.

I’m honestly happiest when I feel challenged (these days I’m trying my hand at skateboarding and Python), and that’s one of the reasons why I left consultancy to join Grab a year ago.

At that time, there were only two people in the product marketing team (we are more than 10 today), so the opportunity to build the function and the team appealed to the adventurer in me. I was also genuinely sold on Grab’s mission to uplift lives in Southeast Asia.

Here’s a peek into a day in my life, though I should add that no two days are ever quite the same.

7 am: Snooze, coffee, and news

At 7 am, the alarm goes off, but I snooze for 30 minutes. This is me trying to catch some extra shuteye. But I must say that some of my best ideas come in the moments between consciousness, when I’m just about to wake up.

When I get out of bed, I go for a cup of coffee, ask Alexa for my news flash briefing, and then hop into a GrabCar to get to work. I’m usually based at our Marina One office where most of our tech team sits, although I often shuttle between our offices at Guoco Tower and Cecil Street, depending on where my next meeting is.

8:30 to 9 am: Window of calm

This is my window of calm before the storm of meetings that usually takes up my day. I use this to get a head start on reviewing work that needs my attention—whether it’s from my own team or from country product managers. You’ll find me at a coffee shop near the office at this time.

10 am: Customer experience

My first meeting is our weekly consumer experience leads regroup. We have engineers, data scientists, product marketing, UX designers, and more in the room, representing the many areas that feed into the overall consumer experience.

In an hour, we cover everything from customer feedback, key metrics, progress updates for upcoming product launches, to team happiness.

We do weekly happiness surveys that give us a sense of how team members are feeling about personal growth, workload, their relationship with their managers, etc. And in this meeting, we try to recognize what’s great and address what’s not.

11 am: Switching hats

I catch up with my product marketing team next.

12 to 1 pm: Tapao meetings

1 to 3 pm: Workshopping the future

3 to 7 pm: Connecting teams

8:30 pm to midnight: Unwind