The used vehicle industry is undergoing a major transformation. New buying and sales models, shifting customer demands, and the introduction of electric vehicles (EV) to the market are challenging automotive leaders to evolve their operations and become more adaptive to change.
A global automotive manufacturer recognized the need for evolution and embarked on a major reorganization initiative to transform its business to a direct sales model.
The used car organization embraced this opportunity and decided to evolve into a modern, customer-centered, and product-led unit. This bold move required them to transition from handling individual projects to modify their value stream towards a suitable product operating model that is able to respond to change more fluently and continuously.
The aim of its reorganization was to create a modernized sales approach to used cars and customer-centric services, thereby decreasing vehicle time on inventory while improving customers’ buying experiences.
However, evolving from a project to a product organization demands significant change. From defining new roles and responsibilities and integrating potentially hundreds of systems, to embedding new ways of working and prioritizing development of the right new capabilities — there’s a lot of change to orchestrate.
Business process modernization, confined capacities, and parallel technological modernization all posed serious risks to progress, so the automotive company turned to Thoughtworks for help.
Looking inward to accelerate business evolution
This certainly wasn’t the first time we’d seen an organization dealing with the challenges their teams faced. So, when we were asked to support the mobilization phase of the journey, our team brought in a lightweight and highly collaborative service design methodology to shape the way forward.
Evolutionary service design is a human-centric approach that empowers teams and leadership to overcome gridlock. Rather than working from static blueprints that only describe vague potential and ideal end-states, evolutionary service design enables teams to capture current and transitional states as a real-scenario baseline. This is essential in complex ecosystems with many unknowns and iterations that change dynamically over a long timeline, as it helps keep everyone on the same page and prioritize the right decisions at the right time. The human-centric approach also helped us to tap into and activate the motivation and passion from everyone to contribute to the change.
We began by conducting interviews, shadowing meetings, performing desk research, and facilitating collaborative workshops with all teams and stakeholders involved. Often, the simplest elements of evolutionary service design are the most impactful. In this business case, bringing its diverse and distributed teams together physically for a laser-focussed two-week workshop was extremely productive and collaborative, and helped everyone map and understand what needed to be done to progress the organization’s evolution.
Alongside the workshops, members of the Thoughtworks team also worked closely with the organization's transformation office and leadership team to build up a true picture of their operations and determine the best ways for their practices to evolve. From there, we were able to quickly help the organization carve out a clear and incremental path forward.
Putting product organization transformation on the right track
Through our exploration phase, we were able to identify and map out the high priority business processes and domain ownership that needed to evolve, assess the barriers preventing teams from getting there, and the capabilities and changes required to support the organization’s transformation.
Together we’ve developed an actionable transformation roadmap that...
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities required to ensure customer success, and eliminate potential gaps or overlap.
Identified significant operational challenges and business risks that needed to be addressed as “thin slices of implementation” to realize significant value, fast.
Introduced a RASCI model — Responsible, Accountable, Supported, Consulted, and Informed — a methodology to help the organization establish clearer decision-making processes.
Aligned everyone around the same priorities and provided clarity on impediments and blockers at the portfolio level.
Established clarity on capacity and capabilities required for the next phases of the product organization roadmap.
Before the exploration phase began, the car manufacturer already had a vision articulated and put in place. Now people in the organization can clearly see what the best next steps are to execute on the strategy, in order to build a highly streamlined used vehicles organization that’s product-oriented, adaptive, and ready for the future challenges of processing and remarketing used vehicles.
Learn more about Thoughtworks’ Evolutionary Service Design approach, and discover how we can help organizations to streamline your path forward and break down the barriers towards a product-centric transformation.
