In Conversation With Ruth Wall

We recently chatted with Ruth Wall, Engineering Manager, who joined us in August 2020. We were keen to find out about her experience of being an Engineering Manager at Cazoo…

Q. What were you up to before you joined Cazoo?

A. I was working for Cambridge University Press as a Scrum Master on an educational book publishing project.

I’ve gone from one extreme to the other. I’ve gone from an organisation that’s existed for 400 years to one that’s existed for six months, so it was a bit of a gear change.

Q. Why did you feel Cazoo was the right fit for you?

A. I was looking for either a coaching role or an engineering management role with a large amount of coaching. I wanted an organisation that took a coaching approach to management and that was interested in creating a supportive environment that helps people grow and learn, and was committed to organisational learning. I really liked the ethos at Cazoo.

Q. Do you feel the reality has lived up to the expectations since you joined?

A. It’s been good, Cazoo manages to live its values pretty well. It’s very fast moving, and it’s growing very fast. This can cause growing pains, but people are genuinely trying to stay true to those values. They are trying to do the most important thing in small increments of customer value.

In situations where we don’t succeed, we’ll take it as an opportunity to learn and to do better next time, which I think is very important.

Q. Do you feel that you’ve been supported in your role?

Yeah, Cazoo have been great. We have a really strong coaching function, which, as I mentioned, was one of the things that I was looking for. Having been a coach and received coaching, it’s incredibly useful to help you think through your own ideas.

I have regular meetings with a coach and she also works with the team. It’s really great to have that kind of support.

The sessions help you better understand the issues you are facing. You can talk about the problem, they’ll ask you questions. They help you better understand your own thinking and then help you formulate your own action plan.

Q. Why have you enjoyed being an Engineering Manager at Cazoo?

A. It’s a bit corny, but the best thing about it is my team. My team is absolutely brilliant. They were brilliant when I arrived, which made it an easy situation to come into. They already had a lot of great behaviours — they’re great communicators, they’ve got a high sense of psychological safety, they’re happy to talk to each other, and they are friends.

To be able to support them and make them even better is just marvellous. They are a joy to work with. They’re always bubbling with ideas to make the team better, it’s great.

Q. What do you think has been key to your teams success?

A. I think teams work best when they’re autonomous and aligned. Alignment is important with autonomy. You don’t want everybody pulling in different directions!

Cazoo’s system of OKRs is quite useful in that way. It’s always really obvious what is the most important thing right now. We have a big overarching project that involves the whole company and everybody’s working towards that goal. This is broken into small slices, and the whole company works in short sprints.

It’s really clear and is an excellent tool for drilling down to the team level. The teams know what they need to do to reach their sprint goal. That kind of organisational alignment is very difficult to find.

Q. Why would an engineer want to work in your team?

A. Ah, the pitch! An engineer should want to work in my team because I’m really committed to helping engineers identify and reach their own goals. I have quite involved conversations with my engineers about what they like, what they’re doing and what they want to do next.

Some people have a really clear idea of what they want to do next, but a lot of people don’t. We examine what’s interesting to them, and come up with a plan around what they can do that is going to interest them. We build on their strengths to take them to that next place in a way that’s also really useful to Cazoo.

Q. Is there anything else you think is great about working at Cazoo?

A. I think the company has a really great commitment to diversity. Cazoo as an engineering organisation is really dedicated to doing the best that they can to improve all kinds of diversity.

One that I hadn’t come across before, that a lot of the team is committed to, is economic diversity. It doesn’t get nearly enough emphasis in the technology community.

Most of us who work in engineering are the people who were lucky enough to be able to tinker with a computer at home when we were kids. That means that the demographic of any engineering organisation skews towards wealthier, more privileged people and changing that, I think, is very important.

Initiatives like the apprenticeship scheme go some way to create new opportunities for young people that didn’t have the privileges that I had growing up.

Q. If you were speaking to an Engineering Manager who was thinking about joining Cazoo, what would your advice be to them?

A. The Engineering Managers group is a really great and supportive bunch of people. I am learning stuff from my peers all of the time. I’m really looking forward to the day when we can all be in the same room and have a beer.

We have a Leadership Community of Practice, which is open to everybody interested in leadership, not only the Engineering Managers. People have been sharing their wisdom on various aspects of leadership that they’ve picked up over the years. A lot of the group are very experienced.

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If you’d be interested in joining Cazoo you can find out more about our current vacancies at: https://www.cazoo.co.uk/careers/