The challenge of designing for colleagues
Before joining Cazoo I was feeling stuck. Stuck with repetitive design challenges. Stuck with a single product. Stuck with not being able to step outside my comfort zone.
This is pretty normal for product designers; as creatives, we always want to work on problems and products that are mentally stimulating and that push us to think in novel ways. The natural response is to look outwards — outside your product, outside your team, even outside your organisation to find that next challenge. But that challenge could have been under your nose the entire time.
Colleagues, or internal users, are often forgotten by Product teams. As Spotify notes, many companies invest in third party tools for internal users early on but these typically don’t meet user needs, resulting in a “hodgepodge of external tools in a workflow”. These tools and workflows tend to stick around and it takes a mature tech organisation to realise and to invest in improvements.
At Cazoo, our colleagues are the lifeblood of our business. They source cars, load them onto transporters, plan routes, meticulously check cars over for quality, and provide amazing handover experiences. Without them we’d just have a website that sells cars, with them we have an incredibly powerful end-to-end experience that makes thousands of customers across Europe happy every month.
At Cazoo, our colleagues are the lifeblood of our business.
I hope I’m starting to convince you that focusing product design effort on colleagues as well as customers can help your organisation achieve goals beyond their wildest dreams. If you need more tangible examples, here are a few problems we’ve helped uncover and solve (or are working to solve) at Cazoo:
- Reducing the time spent doing manual or redundant tasks
- Improving our vehicle management processes
- Experimenting with new tech to track vehicles
- Intelligently figuring out where vehicles need to go and what needs to be done to them
- Reducing reliance on third party technology
Focusing product design effort on colleagues as well as customers can help your organisation achieve goals beyond their wildest dreams
All this is ultimately to help our colleagues efficiently allocate time to deliver a five-star customer experience. That could mean anything from having more time to check cars over, transporting them to their destination, or walking a customer through their new purchase!
That’s not why you’re here though, you want to hear about product design challenges and how they’re different to challenges faced by customers. So without further ado:
Mental models and choice
In retail, customers typically have a lot of choice about where they choose to spend their money. It’s often the case that your product or service will need a compelling reason to get someone to part ways with their hard earned cash. You’ll also need to give customers an intuitive user experience, whether that’s through frictionless checkout or an extremely detailed product description page, getting these basics wrong will mean that customer will look to a competitor.
This isn’t the case when designing for colleagues. Colleagues have no choice, they have to use the products and services the business provides to do their job. At Cazoo we’ve found that designing and developing tools in-house gives us the flexibility and speed to respond to changing business and user needs. Our tech teams build incredibly strong relationships with colleagues, whether they’re planning routes or handing over cars to customers, our users always feel like they’re able to reach out and raise problems or issues with their tech.
Colleagues have no choice, they have to use the products and services the business provides to do their job
At Cazoo our customers will typically have less frequent interactions with our products and services. We sell high value, big purchase products that mean after most customers transact and receive their products, we won’t expect to hear from them again for a while. Our design team needs to think about a smaller number of critical touchpoints that help a large number of customers make a decision on whether or not to transact.
In contrast, internal users are likely to have a high number of less critical touchpoints with a product. In some instances at Cazoo, our users use the products we design for several hours a day. This changes the principles of our product design team; instead of designing products that are convincing we now need to design products that are reliable, robust, and repeatable.
Physical environment
Chances are if your customer is thinking about making a purchase, they’re likely in a pretty comfortable place. They could be at work on their lunch break, at home with a coffee, or on holiday by the beach. As a designer you’ll likely need to focus on delivering a high quality experience across many devices.
At Cazoo, the majority of our internal users are working out ‘in the field’. This includes:
- Car storage sites
- Vehicle Preparation Centres (think massive car workshops)
- Retail and servicing sites
- A customer’s driveway
- Temporary office space (for newly acquired sites)
- On the road (in one of our multi or single car transporters)
We also have colleagues who are desk based either from an office or from home. Our design teams need to battle with problems like changing weather conditions, differences between day and night operations, and rural locations with no data accessibility.
Task linearity
Think about the typical flow for purchasing a product: Search → Browse → Add → Checkout → Receive. It’s very rare a retail experience will diverge from this model as customers are so used to it. The stages the customer goes through are fairly straightforward with a clear goal that can be sequenced. As a product designer, you can be pretty certain that if a customer is checking out, that they’ve gone through the task of finding and reading about a product.
With colleagues, much like anyone’s job, the flow of tasks isn’t as linear, nor can they be easily predicted. For example, retail colleagues at Cazoo may start their day immediately with handing over a vehicle to a customer or they might start by checking over vehicles that have arrived overnight. The fact that no two days are the same makes creating products that neatly align to a flow of tasks quite challenging.
To overcome this, we invest heavily in research with colleagues. Cazoo empowers all product teams to carry out their own research with steering and guidance from dedicated user researchers. This includes user interviews, focus groups, drop-in sessions, diary studies, and ethnographic research (e.g. in-field observation).
Given the fast paced nature of our business, it’s incredibly important that our teams have an accurate, up-to-date view of what’s happening with users on the ground.
Importance of process
Despite what I just said about tasks not being linear, it’s incredibly important to both understand and help shape the processes for accomplishing tasks when working with internal users. With customers, the buying experience is likely to be scattered and tailored to an individual’s needs. For example, a customer may search for and research multiple types of cars on different sites before making a decision.
This type of scattered activity makes creating tech solutions for internal users extremely challenging. Consider checking a car over for imperfections — some people may start with the exterior of the car, others with interior, some people might start in the boot, others might look under the bonnet. When creating a tech solution to help enable this activity, you’ll probably be stuck with a ‘Where do I start?’ type question.
Defining a single, repeatable process for common tasks at Cazoo (like checking over a vehicle) is done in collaboration between operational and tech teams. It’s not always easy but we’ve found it helps deliver the most effective user experience while helping to achieve business goals. These goals are often directly tied to quarterly or annual company objectives such as reducing cost or improving efficiency. One of Cazoo’s four company values is to be data-driven and product teams are expected to know exactly how process changes or improvements will impact business outcomes.
Like with research, product teams are empowered to collaborate with stakeholders and help change or create new processes. We’re also lucky to have cross-team service designers who help provide guidance and feedback to teams that are establishing process change.
Complexity of stakeholders
Dealing with people is complex regardless of whether you work in customer products or internal ones. But as a product designer working on customer products you’re able to lean heavily on user insight to guide and shape the team’s work. With products made for colleagues, your users can have varying levels of influence within the company.
These varying levels of influence can often have quite profound impacts on the way products are designed and developed. At Cazoo for example, many of our Customer Centre Specialists go on to become Senior Customer Centre Specialists. Their role is now a mix of doing ‘hands on’ work with cars and customers as well as aspects of leadership and people management. Their view and usage of the products that our tech teams design will also change.
Product designers working with colleagues at Cazoo have to be well versed at understanding what is a clear user need, what is a valuable business goal, and what is the highest paid person’s opinion (HiPPO). This requires strong facilitation skills, and an ability to understand multiple different points of view. It’s often a difficult line to tread but pays off massively when teams understand the difference between user needs and stakeholder goals.
Product designers working with colleagues at Cazoo have to be well versed at understanding what is a clear user need, what is a valuable business goal, and what is the highest paid person’s opinion
So there you have it. I hope you don’t come away from this blog post feeling nervous or out-of-your-depth. Working to design products for colleagues and do my bit to help improve their 9 to 5 has been the biggest challenge of my career but also the one that has been the most rewarding.
Regardless of where my career goes, I know that I’ll take a whole heap of invaluable learning with me.
Think you can come and work in the Operations Design team? Cazoo yeah you can! Check out our openings.
Credit: Pete Hodson, Kate Sims, and Simon Wood for reviewing and shaping.
