Carvana Digital Design
First Digital Project Manager on Carvana’s Digital Design team. I built the project lifecycle system the team ran on, from intake through delivery.
- Client
- Carvana (in-house: Marketing, Product, Engineering)
- Role
- Manager, Digital Project Management
- Year
- 2017–2021
- Focus
- Process Design, Resource Planning, Team Leadership Operations, Cross-Functional Partnership
Overview
The brief.
Digital Design was a small team serving three internal clients, Marketing, Product, and Engineering, all building a new way to buy a car online. Requests came from every direction and there was almost no process for managing a project from start to finish. Priorities collided and capacity was a guess.
The work.
I partnered across the company to learn what each group needed from design and where time was getting lost. The team’s work covered all digital touchpoints throughout the customer’s journey of buying a new car, including: internal tools used by operations teams, and across all digital marketing efforts. I was responsible for growing and scaling a dedicated team of Project Managers to oversee all efforts being done by the design and product teams.
Improvements I drove.
I built the team’s project management system from scratch. It started with a defined intake process with the Product org, so every project kicked off with the details design needed instead of chasing them mid-sprint.
I introduced resource management and planning: forecast demand, match skill sets to availability, and prioritize incoming work by level of effort and business priority. I brought in Wrike as the single tool for resource planning and task management, replacing Jira, which the design team had been using.
Cross Functional Leadership.
As the de facto Program Manager for Design Resources, I made a point to partner closely with Product and Engineering to cut the friction between their teams and ours. I partnered with design leadership on how resources were assigned, and where we needed to scale, in order to provide better customer experiences across the customer journey, and not only focusing on faster deliveries.
Outcome.
The system became the team’s standard way of working and is still in use to this day. We drastically reduced turnaround time, increased collaboration by creating SME’s while expanding coverage across all product areas. I oversaw 3x growth of the design team and managed a team of 3 project managers.