On the Front Line: six months as a Product Manager at carwow
What I learnt about being a Product Manager at carwow
Starting any new job or role can be an intense experience as you go through acclimatising to a new work setting, adjusting to a culture, and finding a rhythm. Nowhere do I think this is more true than in the role of a Product Manager. This is often a central role, with big expectations from the company, and has a wide scope of responsibilities. In January 2021, I took my first steps as a PM by joining the Product Management team at carwow.
With the benefit of hindsight — having just passed 6 months in the job — I wanted to take time to reflect on the notable “a-ha” moments or 💡 realisations that happened. Whilst not exhaustive, hopefully it will help bring some clarity to what it is like working as a Product Manager at carwow — an ambitious scale-up with a hugely bright future — and more broadly, as a Product Manager in a rapidly-growing company.
Full disclosure: I actually joined carwow in August 2019, so I was fortunate enough to have checked off some of the induction and typical newbie tasks. As for everything else with changing jobs/roles: learning the product in depth, adapting to new ways of working, and learning all those acronyms was (and really is still) an ongoing learning experience!
🙅🏼♂️ Moment 1 — Saying “no” is important.
In 1997, as interim CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs decided to kill multiple product lines. Partners and developers were extremely unhappy about the decision, but Steve had this to say:
“Focusing is about saying no…and the result of the focus is really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts”
For me, this quote captures the essence of what I’ve learnt PMing at carwow: we need to focus on making really great products by saying “no” to many tempting opportunities.
Every organisation has a finite engineering and design resource. Therefore we need to be conscious of where we direct our team’s energy. Once we have picked the strategic direction, it is critical to commit to it.
At carwow, it is the same. In fact, right now there are so many opportunities in automotive-tech as it goes through a period of huge disruption, that it is critical to pick our strategic priorities and deliver on these. For us, right now this is our focus on Sell Your Car.
Crucially, this means one of the jobs of the PM needs to be saying “no”, whilst being mindful to do it in a tactful and empathetic way. Ideally a “no” is grounded in evidence about why changing focus isn’t a good idea for the bigger company picture.
Of course, assessing opportunities is still important. There might even be times we need to change course but we shouldn’t change focus easily or neglect considering trade-offs and maintaining work that is already underway.
🧠 Moment 2 — Setting great OKRs is hard.
My second “a-ha” moment came when trying to set great OKRs. A core way that the Product teams at carwow work is by having clear objectives and results to measure our successes or failures.
What have I learnt? Setting great OKRs is harder than you think. If you’ve ever Googled them, they can seem easy to come up with, but dig a little deeper and spend a bit more time on them and you soon realise that setting a great OKR is a real skill, and you should put time into drafting them.
Finding a balance between ambition and what is achievable. Breaking objectives into focus areas to work on, but not so much that they become prescriptive. Making sure you have agency over the metrics to measure your key results. These are some of the things I’ve learnt to consider when setting OKRs at carwow and are areas I’m still learning about.
At carwow, we try to spend time thinking, drafting, discussing and then finalising our OKRs with team members and stakeholders. We also incorporate our user research and company vision into our thinking. It might sound quite intense, but if we’re going to bet the business’s resources on a great outcome, it makes sense to invest time in the stepping stones to get there.
🐶 Moment 3 — The PM super power.
Dog fooding — the practice of using your product yourself as you build it — is probably one of the most enlightening things you can do, second only to interviews in my opinion.
I really like to get as close as I can to what users of the product experience when they come onto carwow, or how other teams interact with our internal systems. I find it has helped give me a significantly better understanding of the product — its best bits and worst bits — but also helps build empathy with users.
So what is the super power that I’ve learnt about in the last six months? As a Product Manager at carwow I’m one of the main individuals who can get changes prioritised and actioned. Our teams are structured so that if we find a pain-point we have the autonomy to analyse the size of the problem and make changes to improve the experience for everyone.
This is one of my favourite parts of the role. Small improvements, such as adding an extra piece of information or giving users some more flexibility in the product can transform a user experience. Of course, I’d add, we are always mindful of it fitting with our core focus and any ongoing maintenance or go-to-market required to launch a change.
The last thing I’d say to this point is with great power, comes great responsibility!
🤹🏼 Moment 4 — Marketplaces are gnarly.
Most parts of a marketplace are a contradiction. You can make one side of the marketplace brilliant, but the other side will typically suffer. As carwow is a marketplace business, this is one of our biggest challenges in the Product team.
For me though, I find this really interesting and fun. We always have to think about both sides of the coin, in all the markets we operate.
The importance of this balancing act is something that I learnt quickly from the team during my first six months. We always have to be aware of product changes and the consequences across the marketplace. This is a really important part of the job, as any stakeholders will have a strong bias towards their viewpoint, which may neglect what they can’t see. For me, this is why I think marketplaces are such a rewarding and exciting place in which to be a PM in, because you have to be mindful of your decisions and keeping the balance whilst still pushing the product forwards.
🏦 Moment 5 — Think about your product debt.
We’re actually a 10-year old company at carwow. What this means for PMs is: as we develop the products and venture into new verticals, we need to consider the product debt we might be creating. Debt in this sense, to me, is when a product is manipulated to make it work in a way which is not originally intended.
So far, how I’ve learnt to manage this is that in recent work we’ve done as a team is to not only add code, but challenge the code that exists. Is it still needed? Does it add any value to users anymore? Why was it originally added, and has the business moved on since then? If we find the answer through some research that a part of the product is obsolete, then we remove it.
Our team’s Tech Lead is particularly passionate about this, and I can see why. By keeping our product debt low, it helps us have the freedom and flexibility to progress the product, without the burden of neglected or misunderstood product logic getting in our way.
🚀 Moment 6 — Discovery is super important.
Before I delved into the Product world I was unsure what the team meant by ‘discovery’, I thought Product teams just worked through features and ran various tests. Like many others I completely underestimated the complexity of let’s just add this feature that I’d always hear (or probably even said myself). Now I often think of the phrase “ideas are cheap”!
Fortunately, at carwow, the team are fans of the gurus in the Product space such as Marty Cagan, Teresa Torres, Lenny Rachitsky, Shreyas Doshi and John Cutler. Quickly I learnt the value of a strong discovery process before doing any delivery.
When we have a problem area, we should invest time in understanding the problem in depth. You can read how we do that at carwow here. But doing this is crucial to meeting your OKRs and building something that solves the problem for a user.
As a key part to the PM job is solving problems, during the past months in the team I’ve done a variety of discovery approaches including customer interviews, surveys, screen recordings and prototype testing. All are fascinating. The outcomes help us evolve our understanding of problems and ideate better. Without discovery, a lot of time can go into something to produce possibly a great product, but if it doesn’t help solve a problem, no one will use it.
I found out the hard way. Prior to joining Product, I worked on a project to produce a great report. It did a lot, but no one cared or used it. Why? Because we didn’t do anywhere near good enough discovery. In particular:
- We didn’t understand the problem upfront or in detail what we were trying to solve.
- The stakeholders weren’t aligned on the problem.
- We hadn’t considered the four core risks to deliver the product such as how much time will need to be invested.
- We didn’t prioritise, or experiment with our ideas quickly to learn fast.
- We forgot that ideas are cheap and delivery is costly!
- Violated all of our Product principles (in hindsight)
One week spent on discovery alone, and I could have probably avoided many months of effort that ultimately amounted to little benefit for users.
Discovery is super important!
👨🏻🎓 Six months, six lessons…
Despite only six months passing, in reality I’ve grown and matured my thinking in a lot of new ways since taking the role of Product Manager at carwow. The level of responsibility and autonomy to deliver a great car buying and selling experience I think is really unique, and an exciting place to be right now. We have a great Product culture at carwow that I’m fortunate to be part of.
If you think you’d also be interested, then please check out carwow.co.uk/jobs, as we are currently hiring!
PS — If you think this article might be of interest to someone you know, please do like and share it. Please add any thoughts or comments as well — I’d love to help you with any questions.
