carsales is a transformative force in the digital automotive industry. The concept of online shopping was novel in 1997 - let alone online shopping for cars. By digitising print classifieds, carsales began an innovative legacy that it has continued to build on for over 25 years.
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Challenge: Sustaining a competitive edge in an evolving marketplace
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Sustainable innovation is at the core of carsales’ DNA. To maintain high performance and organisational agility in a rapidly evolving technological space, they needed to refine and elevate their internal development processes.
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With improved engineering practices in place, carsales could remain a leader in the industry by strengthening its capabilities and taking advantage of innovative technology, including leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the automotive buying and selling experience.
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Solution: Engineering excellence to accelerate execution
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carsales initially engaged ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ to bring the technical skills needed to adopt its platform modernisation project, a proprietary server-driven UI framework that unifies multi-platform development. This collaboration included a program-wide retrospective to identify opportunities to improve ways of working.
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Together, carsales and ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ capitalised on these opportunities by redefining communication and execution pipelines, enhancing operational efficiency and increasing speed to market. This evolution in ways of working spanned from team dynamics to engineering practices, as outlined below.
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Creating high-performing teams
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By redefining roles and responsibilities, carsales was able to improve decision-making, execution speed, and delivery efficiency. The adoption of story mapping for release planning provided teams with a clear visual representation of the development lifecycle, enabling better resource allocation and minimising time lost to unclear priorities.
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With clearer roles comes more predictability – meaning smoother deployment and reduced costs thanks to fewer surprises in the development cycle.
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One of ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥â€™ biggest assets is their understanding of team dynamics. The ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ team really embedded themselves within ours, building strong personal connections and becoming an extension of our own. By working together, we not only validated some of our existing ideas but also surfaced challenges we hadn’t fully recognised - giving us the clarity to address them. This collaboration helped us to improve engagement and communication processes, unlocking even greater value for our engineering teams.
Efficient and effective engineering practicesÌý
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To optimise carsales’ engineering practices, we introduced Test-Driven Development, which involves writing tests before writing code. This shift resulted in:
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Higher code quality: Early refinement reduced rework and bugs in production.Ìý
Developer confidence: Immediate feedback eliminated regression issues and guesswork.
Faster delivery speed: Cleaner code minimised delays and required less defect resolution.
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To further streamline testing practices, we enhanced their test pyramid by introducing system tests and contract tests: automated quality checks, reducing the risk and cost of manual testing. Expanding automation freed up the carsales team to dedicate their attention to higher-value tasks, and the overall process saw higher code quality at a lower cost.
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Impact of new processes demonstrated through carsales’ AI Model Finder
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The impact of internal process improvements was clearly demonstrated when the carsales team launched a reimagined customer journey: an AI-powered vehicle recommendation tool that tailors car suggestions based on buyers’ lifestyle needs, preferences, and aspirations. This project leveraged new ways of working to streamline execution, improve collaboration, and accelerate delivery.
By adopting improved engineering standards and processes, the Model Finder project delivered significant benefits, including:
Efficient use of resources
Risk reduction
Faster time-to-market
Higher overall return on investment
Building Model Finder allowed us to see the new ways of working in action. Not only did we deliver a cutting-edge, AI-powered tool for our customers, but our team also gained confidence in the process improvements ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ helped us implement. The learnings from this collaboration have enabled us to continue past the engagement with the same pace and discipline of building the ‘right thing’, and ‘building it right’.
Outcomes: Internal transformation for customer experience innovation
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Through its partnership with ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥, carsales gained valuable insights into operational challenges and opportunities affecting performance and agility. Through the introduction of its platform modernisation project and refining engineering practices, carsales achieved significant efficiency and productivity gains. These improvements enabled the cost-effective development of Model Finder - strengthening carsales’ internal transformation while enhancing the customer experience and further advancing its purpose: To make buying and selling a great experience.Ìý
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