Cazoo’s Platform as a Product, the journey so far
“The Platform” is a phrase we use to refer to a set of self service tools, APIs and capabilities that aim to reduce developers’ cognitive load and enable Cazoo’s product teams to focus on our core business competencies.
But the concept of “Platform as a Product” is a relatively new concept for many, and one that has been a fantastic challenge to tackle at Cazoo.
Why does a Platform Team need Product thinking?
Well, we could have the most impressive services and capabilities available, but without customer validation and articulation of the value this brings, adoption can be scarce.
Like any other product team, the principle of “build it and they will come” tends to only get you so far.
A thorough understanding of factors influencing cognitive load for developers was crucial for us to build the right capabilities.
The Vision & Strategy
The first step in our journey was to craft a vision and strategy for the platform; asking ourselves, “what’s at the heart of what we do, where do we see ourselves in 2–3 years time, and ultimately — what does great look like?”
Cazoo has been through a hyper-growth phase for the past couple of years, enabling highly autonomous teams. The platform strategy started by focussing on operational excellence, ensuring that capabilities built in such a fast paced environment were deployed with platform best practices and policies in place.
In parallel, it was key for us to establish feedback loops with our customers and contributors to the platform. We wanted to mitigate any risks from building solutions without a solid foundation of customer insight or validation.
- Measuring what matters 📏
In order for us to track the success of the platform, we started to ensure that any new initiatives we launched were measurable in order to track adoption and engagement
- Support Request Data 🆘
We began utilising the support request data at our disposal, identifying areas where teams were facing issues
- Survey 🗣
We ran a survey with the engineering management community to identify their perceptions of platform and any initial problem areas
- Early adopters 🙋
Observability was a key area of opportunity identified from the Engineering Management survey. And so, the Platform team engaged engineers in customer journey mapping exercises to understand the problems, then invited early adopters to the new observability platform as we built it out. This provided us with feedback as we progressed through the build, so we could iterate and improve the solution.
- Office Hours ⏰
Our support request process was working well, but behind a ticketing system, it was difficult to build that personal rapport with our customers. We introduced a weekly “office hours” session where customers could come to us with their challenges, ask questions, and provide feedback.
- Champions Network 🏅
We’re a small platform team and scaling our message out to hundreds of developers can be a challenge, so we went on to introduce the Champions Network. We recruited a representative from each tech team in Cazoo who would help spread the word about our platform initiatives and provide valuable insights as we build out our capabilities. This really helped us to bring “platform thinkers” into the fold.
- Research Study 🔎
As we continued on our journey to truly understand the needs of our customers, we worked in collaboration with the Cazoo research specialists, to really think about what we’d like to find out, and draw up a plan. We began with a survey across tech that enabled us to capture high level measures at scale.
With over 80 respondents, we received responses from across tech with good coverage across each team and a range of tenure. We had a vast amount of quantitative data, backed up with qualitative insights into the rationale behind the scores. We studied the data at length and ran some thematic analysis to identify common patterns and themes.
From this research, we believe that a central source for best practices is a huge area of opportunity for the platform team to add value across the engineering community. Our objectives for the coming year will focus on these core areas:
- An MVP developer portal to house best practices and standards, we’re starting by testing out Spotify’s open source Backstage framework
- The creation of new self-service tooling and modules
- A scalable, long term feature flagging solution
- Partnering with quality engineering colleagues to define observability maturity building blocks
- Sunsetting our legacy observability platform
Looking forward
As our strategy continues to take shape, we’re working towards our next horizon where we equip developers with more self-service tools out of the box. We’re harnessing the insights at our disposal to build, test and refine our solutions. We’re excited to keep learning and iterating on a solution that will reduce cognitive load for Cazoo’s tech teams.
