Scaling-up operations

Cazoo was moving cars around the UK at pace, and the tech to do it lived across four separate products used by showroom staff, truck drivers, and refurbishment engineers. Each product had its own designer, its own user base, and its own idea of what good looked like. There was no shared logistics journey and no design function joining them up. I was hired to do that.

I hired two senior designers, a mid-level designer, and a contractor. It was a mix weighted toward experience because the work needed judgement fast, not scale. I ran regular sessions bringing the four of us together as one operations design team, mapping the current state, building a shared vision of the end-to-end journey, and locating the seams between our products where users were losing the plot.

Designing for internal users taught me something specific: your users are also your stakeholders. That collapses a dimension of the work. You can't hide behind personas, and every design decision is being weighed by someone who lives with the consequences. I leaned into that, running the team's rituals with product and engineering openly and making sure the design work was always visible and challengeable.

I was there a year. I handed over a high-functioning team with a solid design roadmap and a much stronger standing for design in the org. I'd made a point of coaching the team on storytelling, talking about the value of their work openly, and by the end that was the thing the wider org noticed.