How to raise a unicorn

In the early 2020s, the used-car market was desperately lacking transparency, convenience and customer satisfaction. It was crying out for a solution that simplified the process of buying and selling vehicles.

Our client emerged as Britain’s fastest-growing unicorn because they helped customers choose from thousands of top-quality cars; pay via card, part-exchange or financing options; and get their chosen vehicle to their doorstep in as little as 72 hours.

Scaling those kinds of capabilities takes hard work and a solid foundation. We built the platform and had it operational in four months.

Here’s how:

This discovery phase saw a cross-functional team use journey mapping, event storming, service design and rapid design iterations to shape the ideal customer experience.

The first touchpoint of the client’s website needed to function like any ecommerce site — but £10,000 cars, not £20 toasters.

This presented a unique challenge for the checkout journey, so we needed to work closely with the founding team to design for trust and simplicity if we were to instil confidence in customers for such complex and emotional purchases.

We also overcame larger logistical challenges by seamlessly connecting the points of purchase to the delivery processes thanks to a deep understanding of over a dozen third-party back-end integrations — all the while providing regular email communications to keep customers informed at every stage of the journey.

We worked closely with the client’s CTO to develop the product with an entirely serverless architecture.

We started with the creation of data pipelines based on AWS services — including SQS, SNS and AWS Lambdas — and an event-driven architecture to maintain maximum capacity and streamline the processes of vehicle acquisition, merchandising and refurbishment.

CI/CD processes enabled us to release multiple updates per day and allow for more scalable business operations, while our co-sourced team of engineers achieved world-first functionality for a range of features with AWS Lambda and CloudWatch Events (functionality that preceded what is now Amazon EventBridge).

As part of an empowered, cross-functional team, we were able to move rapidly and efficiently throughout the process.

Continuous validation with stakeholders and customers meant the roadmap was always focused on the outcomes deemed most valuable for both the business and its customers, no matter the market and no matter the method of payment.

As the client’s digital partner, we were able to plug straight into the customer journeys and optimize them for European expansion. This included reducing the fee per transaction via open banking, offering automatic payouts for UK car sellers, and enabling SOFORT and SEPA as payment methods in the EU.

As we worked iteratively toward expanding the client’s payment systems in the UK and Europe, we helped build a flexible and robust service with a unified interface. For even greater efficiency and agility, we leveraged AWS’s state machine infrastructure to break the process into smaller steps for reuse between payment options.

What’s more, our collective OKRs helped us stay on track and consistently prioritize the most valuable outcomes in a rapidly changing landscape, while our experts supported the clients in-house strategy by fully transitioning our capabilities to its internal teams.

The client acquired a pair of leading car subscription services to accelerate its own go-to-market service in the UK and simultaneously step into other countries across Europe.

We helped the client’s teams devise an end-to-end, online and offline service — from mapping the current state of the service offered by each acquired company to co-creating and redesigning key moments of the journey.

We moved from ideation to service delivery by bringing to life touchpoints and defining how customer service agents would interact with the customer at key stages of the journey, such as a pre-delivery call or to answer payment queries.

We redesigned prioritized stages of the service and zoomed in to work on the details with multiple delivery teams, including product engineering, legal, finance, CS, CRM and more.

We explored different ways to tackle each problem by taking into consideration customer needs, employee ways of working and tech/system capabilities. We considered and identified many different scenarios, including happy and unhappy paths, and made sure the client would be ready to provide the service.

The blueprint we implemented mapped the journeys, processes and operations for all actors and instilled connected thinking with a customer-centric view. It became a source of truth for all relevant teams and a valuable asset for the client to take forward, refine and iterate as it onboarded new people and built awareness of the service.

The client’s ambition to spearhead used car sales in the UK required a robust data architecture that could scale with consumer demand and inform the company’s shopping lists with accurate search and sales records.

Our flexible strategy and ongoing engineering support not only optimized the product experience, but also enhanced the client’s operational efficiencies and additional revenue opportunities.

4 Months to private beta launch

1,000-plus Cars sold in the first 12 weeks

2 Months to build a complete consumer finance journey