Auto Trader Product & Technology — The Eras Tour

This is a story that starts from humble beginnings, charting an incredible journey showing how one can evolve over multiple eras, always staying culturally relevant whilst building upon and honouring the eras that have come before.

It’s a story that shows you can be hugely successful in your field whilst being your authentic self and maintaining strong values, and that the only way to remain relevant over time is to be prepared to constantly reinvent yourself.

Welcome to the Eras Tour from Product & Technology at Auto Trader

We recently introduced a new operating model across Product & Technology (P&T) at Auto Trader, which gave us an opportunity to reflect on the journey we’ve been on through the previous eras of P&T. This article covers:

• A whistle-stop tour through the different eras of P&T (with slightly less pyrotechnics than Taylor’s version, sorry).
• The principles for how we organise our technology teams and how this has contributed to Auto Trader’s remarkable transformation.
• The various challenges we’ve faced as we’ve grown, and how we’ve evolved our operating model to overcome these.
• An introduction to the latest P&T ‘Community’ era, and what we hope to gain from this.
• Some personal reflections on things I’ve observed and learned being part of teams responsible for organising and leading large communities of technologists.

P&T at Auto Trader has grown from a handful of developers building the first Auto Trader website 26 years ago, to a community of nearly 400 people that today includes software engineers from various speciality disciplines, designers, researchers, data scientists, product managers, business analysts and delivery leads (and more, sorry if I’ve missed you off). Over time we’ve evolved how our teams are organised as we’ve grown, priorities have shifted and the world around us has changed, influenced by new technologies, new working practices, broader society and cultural norms.

This story has been told through a brilliant animation from JT in our Creative Studio.

Tech as a function (-2013): Product, Design and Engineering operating as separate departments and work delivered via projects managed in a waterfall fashion.

Squads & Tribes (2013–2018): We introduced multidisciplinary Squads, each with a clear mission and able to operate with relative autonomy, with multiple Squads forming a Tribe.

Blue Cards (2018–2021): We conciously moved away from fixed, permanent Squads to a more fluid structure that enabled us to swarm larger groups of people on our biggest priorities we called ‘Blue Cards’, alongside smaller projects and BAU, within Tribe structures based around our primary users (e.g. consumer, retailer, commercial). You can read more about this here.

Engineering Tribes (2021–2024): We retained the principle of bigger groups of people swarming on strategic priorities, but moved from five to three Tribes, each with more ownership over the systems required to deliver end-to-end services.

P&T Community (2024-): As we have grown to a community of ~400 people, we’ve more deliberately created organisational ‘homes’ for our various speciality disciplines responsible for things like line management and career development, whilst maintaining the core concept of cross-functional teams collaborating together day-to-day.

Looking forward to the next Era

Whilst much has changed in the last decade in P&T, the principles of how we organise teams to build and operate our products and services have remained consistent and are deeply embedded in how we work.

• We believe in people from various disciplines working together day-to-day in empowered, motivated, multidisciplinary teams.
• We believe that face-to-face communication is the most effective manner to collaborate.
• We believe in delivering software continually in small releases, and that working software is the primary measure of progress.
• And we believe that technical excellence and good design makes us better and faster in the long run.

We’re excited about the next era of P&T at Auto Trader. It feels more like an evolution than a revolution, building on the eras that have come before whilst addressing the issues we experience as we grow. We can’t predict the challenges or unintended consequences of our current structure and when that will mean we need to evolve again, but the only constant is change so I’m sure at some point we’ll be looking back on the P&T Community era and forward to the next one.

Some personal reflections

Please feel free to stop reading at this point, but below are some personal musings about things I’ve observed and learned about helping to organise and lead groups of people working across Product & Technology.

• Organisations are in a constant state of evolution. An operating model will be right for a period of time, and then things will change. Solving one challenge will invariably create unintended consequences that need to be addressed in the future.
• Building on the above… Organisations are like pendulums. They tend to swing hard in one direction, go too far, and then swing back. The skill is in keeping these inevitable swings as close to equilibrium as possible.
• Drawing lines around groups of people and giving them an identity (a team, a department, a squad, a tribe etc.) is often helpful, but creates an artificial boundary that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Management of things across boundaries (priorities, roadmaps, dependencies, people etc.) requires work and is where friction tends to occur, so in principle, the fewer boundaries the better.
• Unless there is an absolute burning platform (an acquisition, sunsetting a product etc.), taking an extra month, or two, or three to make sure you’ve considered all the possible implications of a change is generally better than rushing it out, however frustrating that might be at the time.
• You’ve got one opportunity to explain to people why it’s the right time to make a change, what those changes are, and how they will be impacted, so put a lot of effort into the communications (crafting the words, choosing the right medium, prepping Q&A etc.).
• The best outcome for any organisational change is for it to feel underwhelming and obvious.