Integration through Acquisition

Cazoo is growing at an exceptional rate, with a 521% year-on-year increase in revenue in the first half of 2021. In order to support this, the product engineering teams have also grown from around 300 when I joined, to around 450 employees within 12 months. The scope of projects within Cazoo is so vast that to cover the grounds, we’ll keep hiring and spinning up new teams. But how do you hire at the rate of growth Cazoo does?

Hiring one person into a small developer team can be tricky; you need to make sure the new person will gel with the rest of the developers, on both a personal and technical level. How can you retain this level of rigour when spinning up whole teams in such short time frames? One route available is through Acquisition.

This isn’t something that every company can do, as you need significant investment behind you to be able to even contemplate such a feat. Nevertheless, it’s one of the many ways that Cazoo has managed to speed up growth and has enabled us to expand in premises, staff & stock. This is my story of integrating into the Cazoo community.

Experiencing an acquisition

I was working for Imperial Car Supermarkets, when one day my manager asked if we could sell a batch of cars to one particular customer. We processed the deals in the usual way, marked them as sold and didn’t think too much of it. This happened again, and again, and again, until this customer had bought nearly 100 vehicles. At this time, COVID-19 was spreading quickly and we were in the first lockdown, when car showrooms could not open. Obviously not good for a business which was heavily reliant upon showroom sales.

It eventually came to light that the customer was Cazoo, and they were purchasing some of our stock to increase their own. A few more sales later, and a few c-suite meetings later, the news breaks to us that Cazoo were acquiring Imperial.

My initial feeling was shock, we’d worked with Imperial for a number of years, and the Imperial software project was older than most of us who had been employed there, and they seemed to be doing really well. After a while however, it was obvious Cazoo would need some engineers to continue to run the software that had been aiding Imperial in its success story. And with there only being a few of us, they approached us to become a new team at Cazoo.

We were told that the new team would expand, that we would get the support of a Quality Engineer, design input, and a lot of exposure to other developers, albeit writing in a different language to us. The opportunity to work at this well funded, market-changing company is something we couldn’t pass up as a team. To go from a small 8–10 employee team, to literally hundreds of developers, agile coaches, product and design minded individuals, was nothing short of a fantastic chance to expand our understanding of top class industry players.

Onboarding

In the early stages, nothing changed too much. Imperial continued to operate for a small window, until all of the stock had been migrated to Cazoo. But there was still a prep centre to run, cars to purchase and other various applications that we used to operate on a day-to-day basis.

It was around 2 months into being full time employees that we really started to see the benefits. We were enrolled into a bootcamp to gain an understanding of the Cazoo mentality and fundamentals, and once this 2 week course had finished, we were then enrolled into a Technical Academy.

This was a great base line to ensure everyone’s level of understanding of TDD, code heuristics, and coding principles were all at the same level. As an employee, this was quite frankly amazing to be given the chance to go on these courses and expand my knowledge, all alongside my day job, proving Cazoo really is investing in its employees for the long term.

Post initial integration

One thing to takeaway from working at Cazoo, is that nothing stands still, and that company direction may change before the week is out. During our early days we worked on a couple of projects, in a more organised, Scrum based setup. This worked well to start with, but we were still getting a lot of urgent requests to drop what we were working on and focus on something else. This was due to the audience of the monolith application that we had built over time. There were a lot of users using our system, and not a vast amount of developers to aid them.

It was then proposed that we try a Kanban setup instead, which allowed for a change in priorities after every ticket. It enables you to see what’s the next most pressing thing before picking it up. Between the change in our agile methodology and the additional role of an ‘Operational Commander’ who was the face of our team to everyone with requests, we were able to be much more adaptive to the changing of priorities mid-week. This helped settle the team, get product tickets out the door, and meant the engineers were expecting change a lot more than when we used the predetermined Scrum setup.

We are not alone

Overall, the entire experience has felt very much like a real life roller-coaster of emotions, from the low-down feelings of what is going to happen, climbing back up the steep hill of a learning curve, and enjoying the ride that has been laid out in front of you. Looking ahead, the only way is up, with learning more and more everyday, staying focussed on top priorities and improving my own skillset due to working on a different technology stack from the Imperial days.

At Imperial, we were the first in an ever-growing list of companies that Cazoo has acquired on its journey from a young startup, to being a major player in the used car industry. Similarly to our journey, Cazoo has since acquired some extra prep centres with their own software, two car-subscription companies to expand our proposition, and Cazana, a vehicle data warehouse. All of these new Cazoo employees will have their own experience, but I’m sure they will equally have an exciting time of on-boarding and joining the ever-growing family.

It goes without saying, I suspect we have not stopped acquiring companies in order to reach the ever-higher goals that Cazoo has laid out for itself, after all, we’re transforming the car buying experience across the UK and Europe.