With rapid growth comes real awareness of the limitations of internal operations. The trick is in how quickly you react so your teams can deliver on the demand and your business can lead within the marketplace.
In 2022, Europe's leading online car retailer, Cazoo, experienced year-on-year growth of 102%, so the time for operational change had arrived. It quickly mobilised to improve its existing tools for purchasing and inventory management and, as Cazoo’s trusted digital partner, we already had the aligned ways of working, internal knowledge and cross-functional expertise to help.
The results put paid to slow processes, repetitive tasks and internal bottlenecks with a suite of bespoke tools, thus reducing operational risks for one of the fastest-growing companies on the continent.
Transforming Cazoo’s internal operations to accelerate speed-to-value
Cazoo
Transforming Cazoo’s internal operations to accelerate speed-to-value
At a glance
Reduced operational risk
Over six months, we identified and replaced the five highest-priority tools across the UK and EU and reduced operational risk across the organisation.
Improved speed to value
The team, which covered product, engineering, design and delivery, created the first working iterations of new dashboards in under two weeks.
Automated manual tasks
Our tools enabled Cazoo’s teams to manage more vehicles with the same resources, from quicker relisting in inventory management to bulk actions in vendor purchasing.
Boosted loading times
While the original dashboards held up operations with P75 loading times of 5-30 seconds, our dashboards sped them up to 1.7 seconds.
Reducing operational risk with bespoke tools for internal use
Scaling isn’t easy when your internal tools have a clunky UI, very slow loading times and poor integration with other tools and dashboards. Add to that the bottleneck of having them managed solely by a data team instead of tech teams and you can see how growth might not come easy if things remained the same.
Our cross-functional team built a suite of bespoke tools to enhance operations across the business, including inbound purchasing, pre-delivery vehicle checks and managing returns and cancellations. Together, we reduced both the operational risk to the business and the burden on the data team by automating manual tasks, streamlining workflows and making data available to everyone.
The bulk actions led to a reduction in processing time from one minute to one second per vehicle, while the improved processes for the inventory team meant they could be 33% quicker at relisting vehicles.
Achieving rapid delivery with industry expertise and deep discovery
The initial discovery phase defined and prioritised 40+ operational dashboards based on risk and potential for improvement. This was coupled with 40+ operational interviews that helped inform user experience maps and research reports, all of which were shared with the tech teams.
An unerring focus on UX improvements and operational efficiencies meant we were able to better integrate new tools with other products’ patterns and guidelines. This not only helped users seamlessly switch between apps, but also allowed us to reuse components across product development. We utilised a front-end UI library based on Google’s Material guidelines, too, which enabled both design and development to build usability and accessibility into interface designs at a component level.
We improved delivery times exponentially with a framework for dashboard creation for Cazoo’s EU markets, while also implementing a serverless application for agility and an automated deployment pipeline for efficiency.
I've been very impressed with the K+C team. They were able to get up to speed quickly in complex areas and delivered business value quickly.
Boaz Valkin Head of Product, Cazoo
In addition, they are very collaborative and aligned to our modern product-technology principles.
On the Product Management side, our K+C product manager has been a fantastic addition to our Product Management practice. During their time at Cazoo they have been one of our strongest Product Managers.
We've all been very impressed with their stakeholder management and outcome-focused discovery.
Cazoo’s trusted digital partner for internal operations
As well as a mutual obsession with cutting-edge customer experiences, we share a drive to create exceptional employee experiences with Cazoo, too. With a bespoke set of innovative, operational tools, we were able to improve processes, reduce risk and deliver value to Cazoo employees in the UK and across the EU in a matter of weeks.
The K+C team are highly competent and have been delightful to work with. Their work has consistently been good quality.
Ronan Klyne Principal Engineer for Operations, Cazoo
They've built designs that bring together technical proficiency and pragmatism.
They have communicated these designs clearly, both in person and in documentation, and have left us with a body of work that we will find easy to maintain.
I've enjoyed working with them and I look forward to doing so again.
Contact us
Are you in need of operational improvements to facilitate rapid growth? Talk to us today about our capabilities at Kin + Carta when it comes to improving internal operations—from product and engineering to design and delivery, we’d love to help.
