Adilla Diningsih and the art of giving someone a bigger job

A few months after an intern became a full-time employee, Adilla Diningsih took her to Ho Chi Minh City. The assignment was Ruangguru’s first brand campaign in Vietnam. Years later, the detail she remembered was how recently Achelia Setiani had made that transition. A new employee had been given a substantial piece of work, in another country, before the ink on her changed status had much time to dry.

Setiani remembered it too. Responding to Adilla’s recollection, she thanked her for the opportunity and the trust, placing the work with Kiến Guru in 2019. Then she offered to help again: one phone call would do. It is a small exchange, affectionate and specific. It gives a business career something a list of appointments rarely provides: a person at the other end of a decision.

Now Chief Business Officer at Ruangguru, Adilla works in an industry whose promises are usually expressed in the future tense. A better examination result. A place at university. A skill that might open a door at work. Her own story began with a considerably smaller unit of ambition: helping someone understand mathematics or physics.

Before the business cards, the tutoring

Adilla started tutoring while still at high school. In 2007, she led Bimbingan Tes Singapura, helping students from her school prepare for university entrance examinations in Singapore. The destinations included Nanyang Technological University, the National University of Singapore and Singapore Management University. These were concrete ambitions, with preparation between the student and the application.

Her own education took her from SMA Negeri 8 Jakarta to computer engineering at Nanyang Technological University. She attended an accelerated class at the Jakarta school before beginning her engineering studies in Singapore. She had crossed the same geographical boundary that the tutoring programme helped other students approach.

It is easy to make a university destination sound inevitable once it appears on a résumé. Entrance preparation restores the effort to the picture. Someone has to work through the questions. Someone has to explain the troublesome part again. Teaching has a useful way of making ambition answerable to the next exercise.

She continued tutoring while studying and working in Singapore. The later business roles would give her responsibility for larger teams and more kinds of learning. The first connection to education was already there, before the executive title arrived.

The useful things beneath the campaign

Her professional route included project work at 2359 Media, APAC operations at 9flats.com and online marketing at PropertyGuru Group. By 2015 she was Vice President of Marketing at Sale Stock, an Indonesian fashion ecommerce business. Education was a continuing interest; the day job also required learning how internet businesses reached customers.

A presentation she uploaded, dated April 2015 in Singapore, is called “Google Tag Manager 101.” Its subject is the machinery beneath a website’s marketing: tags, triggers, variables and the data layer. The slides describe how to update tracking code and organise the signals used to understand what visitors do. An introductory presentation is a modest artefact. It also shows a willingness to explain the plumbing.

There is a certain comedy in how much commercial excitement depends on unglamorous arrangements. The campaign gets the photograph. The tracking tag gets a troubleshooting session. Both matter if a team wants to know whether the photograph persuaded anyone to do anything.

At Sale Stock, a campaign using Smartly.io automatically promoted social posts that met performance criteria. The reported figures were a monthly reach of 19.5 million and click-through rates of 9.96% for existing customers and 9.72% for prospective ones. Those are campaign figures, rather than a personal scorecard. Adilla’s accompanying comment is about removing manual advertising work so the team could concentrate on performance and optimisation.

The revealing word is productivity. Automation freed attention for decisions. A team still had to decide what to make of the results, but it spent less time repeatedly assembling the advertisements. The benefit she described was practical, measured in work that people could stop doing.

“Our team could really focus on performance and optimization”

Adilla Diningsih, on Sale Stock’s advertising workflow

The executive who still teaches Excel

Ruangguru brought those commercial skills back into education. Adilla joined its sales and marketing leadership in 2017. Alongside the management responsibilities, she appears as an instructor in Skill Academy’s Microsoft Office courses. The curriculum includes Word, Excel formulas, simple data visualisation and PowerPoint. A chief business officer and a worksheet are perfectly capable of occupying the same career.

The Excel course begins with the basics: templates, tabs, copying, filling and formatting. Later modules cover text functions and logical functions, including IF, AND and OR. These are small instruments with everyday uses. A learner who understands a conditional formula can make a sheet behave differently, without waiting for somebody else to repair it.

That gives the teaching a pleasingly ordinary scale. Much professional development is advertised with the vocabulary of reinvention. Here, part of the syllabus is getting a worksheet to do what you asked. There is dignity in that. Competence often announces itself by making a previously irritating task manageable.

Skill Academy’s enterprise catalogue also lists Adilla as the instructor for a course on increasing productivity with Microsoft Excel. The audience extends beyond school examination preparation to employees learning tools for their jobs. Her teaching presence sits within the same business that she helps operate, bringing the instructor’s task into view beside the executive’s.

A tablet, a pen, and an access problem

In April 2019, she represented Ruangguru during Samsung’s introduction of new Galaxy tablets. The partnership put Ruangguru learning material within reach of users of the Galaxy Tab A with S Pen. Videos, practice questions and infographic summaries formed part of the offer, with content spanning school grades one through twelve.

Adilla framed the collaboration around access to quality education. Her comments included teachers, parents and children, rather than treating the device’s owner as the only person involved. A tablet partnership is a distribution decision; in a family, it also enters a set of relationships about who studies, who helps and who decides what learning is worth paying for.

The hardware was one route to the lesson. The educational promise still depended on the content and the person using it. That is the recurring tension in her work: the business can arrange a channel, a campaign or a course, but learning has to happen at the far end.

When the classroom becomes a public question

The business also faced scrutiny. In June 2020, Indonesia Corruption Watch questioned the separation between digital platforms and training providers in the Kartu Prakerja programme. Its analysis named Adilla among Ruangguru-associated individuals listed as training providers on Skill Academy. The criticism concerned overlapping institutional roles and the potential conflicts involved in curating and supervising training offered within a connected platform.

Ruangguru had said in May that its selection had followed government verification requirements and that participants chose their classes. By September, the company said Skill Academy had shifted its focus in Kartu Prakerja to being a training institution, rather than a digital platform partner. These were public questions about the programme’s structure and the company’s participation. They should be read with that scope.

They belong in a career concerned with educational access because access is also a question of accountability. Who selects the course? Who checks the provider? Who judges the result? An education business needs answers for the learner and for anyone responsible for the arrangement around that learner.

A farewell sung by the team

In September 2021, Adilla marked a change of responsibilities with a post about the sales and marketing team’s voices. They were performing together for the last time in that configuration. She had led them for four years. The occasion could have been described entirely through titles and reporting lines; she chose to begin with the team singing.

She welcomed Ignatius Untung and Hary Kapota as the new marketing and commercial leaders, and described her next role in business and operations as supporting both teams’ growth. The handover retained a connection to the work she was leaving. A new assignment came with colleagues she still intended to help.

Placed beside the Vietnam recollection, it makes a consistent pair of moments. In one, a recently promoted employee gets room to work on a new campaign. In the other, an established team gets new leaders and a former leader moves into a supporting operational role. Careers expand through decisions about other people’s work as well as one’s own.

Another generation gets an assignment

Ruangguru announced Adilla’s promotion to Chief Business Officer in November 2024, alongside appointments for finance and marketing leadership. The company’s Management Associate Programme also lists her among its mentors. The programme describes three rotations across business functions during a two-year journey, with projects and guidance from senior managers.

For a young employee, rotation means having to become useful in unfamiliar work more than once. The appeal is easy to understand. So is the difficulty. A new function brings new questions, and a title on the programme cannot answer them by itself. Mentorship needs somebody willing to spend time on the particulars.

Adilla’s career offers several versions of that transaction: entrance-exam preparation, marketing instruction, software lessons and the opportunity given to Setiani in Vietnam. The assignments changed. Each involved putting another person closer to work they hoped to do.

The exchange with Setiani ends with an offer to return the favour. One call away. For all the attention paid to growth charts and executive appointments, there is a satisfying measure of a working relationship in that sentence: years later, somebody still wants to pick up.