It’s been a great time at CarNextDoor. It’s time to move on, but before we go, I’d like to note where my efforts have been in the last 20 months.
At times I was holding a product manager role. These are the features and products I designed and built
Car Next Door has a lot of internal processes for dealing with customers. For example, onboarding a car onto the platform involves at least 4 people at different times. And that's one process for one car. There are hundreds of new cars to deal with every week. Everything was organised through a series of spreadsheets. However a process was error prone and was failing more and more as the company grew.
I was asked to provide the solution for it. I came up and developed an internal workflow system. It’s much simpler and easier to understand in comparison with traditional workflow systems. It’s flexible and powerful. The operations people found it useful and at the time of leaving it was the main tool for the car's internal processes.
These are the areas of app architecture which I lead:
At the time the mobile app was under active development. And I was in charge of implementing API to support a mobile app. There already was a failed attempt to implement api called v0. It had numerous issues. There was no clear structure or serialisers, everything was done on an ad-hoc basis. API functionality was inconsistent to web functionality and was running duplicated logic which wasn’t updated as the business grew.
My focus was to make a consistent and reliable API. While the API architecture itself didn’t take much time, it was much harder to refactor business logic. That required refactoring and moving code from controllers to services objects.
After the API dev work I was focusing on transitioning the company to be more data driven. Before there were little to none insights on the customer’s behaviour and patterns. The first part was convincing how valuable it was and then executing on the promise. Mixpanel.com was chosen as a platform. All the relevant data was fed from the majority of services: emails, website, mobile app, backend, user surveys, A/B tests. That allowed us to better understand the customers and their full experience with the platform.
Slack Roulette is a slack chat bot that I wrote to improve cross department collaboration. Every week the bot matched pairs of people to catch up. It was loved across departments and connected people who would never have the opportunity to talk.