Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: Hi everyone, and welcome to Navigating Forks in the Road, the Ways of Working Journey at Cox Automotive. We are thrilled to have everyone here with us today, and we're excited to share our story and our learnings. Before we get started, a little bit about us. I'm Nazia Ali. I joined Cox Automotive a little over three years ago, first leading the enterprise platform's agile transformation, and now heading up enterprise technology enablement. My team and I are responsible for capabilities to enable our technology service outcomes, optimize ways of working, and create excellent experiences for our team members and our stakeholders.

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: And hi everyone. I'm Dan Sloan, and I've been with Cox Automotive for almost five years, and I'm a member of Nazia's awesome team in enterprise technology enablement. I'm focused on leading transformational capabilities in DevOps, strategy, and other areas to enable our journey into new ways of working across the enterprise technology space. And we're thrilled to be here. We're excited to share our journey with all of you, so thank you for coming.

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: Now, Cox Automotive is a division of Cox Enterprises. Cox Enterprises is 122 years old. It started as a newspaper business in Dayton, Ohio. Our founder, James M. Cox, was a two-time Ohio governor and 1920 presidential candidate. Today, Cox Enterprises is led by our CEO, Alex Taylor, who is the great-grandson of Governor Cox. We are now one of the largest family-owned businesses in the world, with a combined annual revenue of 21 billion and over 50,000 employees. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Cox Automotive is among the largest automotive services providers in the world. You likely know many of our brands: Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim Auctions, Dealertrack, software companies vAuto, Xtime, and more. We are working every day to transform the way the world buys, sells, owns, and uses cars. We're involved in nearly every corner of the auto industry. We do everything except build them. Now here's a look at how a 122-year-old company is taking a huge leap into the future of automotive. Imagine a world where 98% of car shoppers are happy and enjoy the process of shopping, buying, and even servicing cars. A world where personalized data removes frustrations and offers recommendations, making daily life more convenient and more awesome. Advanced technology encourages them to consider alternate vehicles and new modes of transportation. Data-driven predictive experiences make everyday tasks possible. This is the one. The future of test driving and servicing can be at the convenience of the consumer. The dealership offers a three-day test model while you wait on your service. That's the one. I like that one. I like this truck. See service ticket and pay, or purchase new vehicle. A subscription mobility platform, where the lifestyle data we collect empowers recommendations to find the vehicle they want on demand. To have easy access to options when they need it most. Wherever the future goes, get there first. So to share a little bit more about Cox Automotive and our global reach, we have 34,000 employees connecting the automotive ecosystem worldwide with a presence in 10 countries. 67% of all car shoppers use either Autotrader or Kelley Blue Book, and I imagine many of you all have perhaps used one of our brands at some point to find your next car. Manheim, the world's largest auto wholesale marketplace, touches over $67 billion in used vehicle transactions every year. And over 15,000 franchise dealership websites are hosted and operated by Dealer.com. And over 22,000 dealers in the US use Dealertrack's finance and insurance platform to create a smooth experience for consumers who find that next great deal online and carry them all the way to the point where they can close that sale in the dealership showroom.

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: And to set some technology context, we have our Cox Automotive product group, which focuses on our market-facing software products, and we have our enterprise technology organization, which provides enabling infrastructure and technology for our product group and for the rest of the company. To touch on just a few key stats about our team, we have 1,000 team members across enterprise technology. As we moved into the pandemic, most of us moved to work from home, so we now see significant number of interactions, over 200,000 daily on Microsoft Teams. We support over 500 product engineering teams across our 10 product portfolios, and our enterprise operations center facilitates over 17,000 changes per year with a 99.8% successful change rate. And some of our business platforms, we've been consolidating our Salesforce orgs over the years. We're down to seven that are supporting 9,000 sales users who create over 150,000 sales opportunities per month. And on the billing side, our financials platforms enable our Manheim Auctions, which processes 90,000 vehicle sales and $2 billion in receipts and payments every week. And our infrastructure footprint, pretty large. We've been consolidating data centers over the years. We're down to 17 data centers now, three of which are considered our long-term core, and we're maintaining a strong security posture with scanning in place across our technology footprint. And to protect our company, we have successfully blocked over 61,000 email threats this year alone. And so to set the stage for our journey, we go back to the year 2015, which was the year that I start. This was a pivotal point in Cox Automotive's history. We had just completed the acquisition of Dealertrack. It was our largest acquisition to date in the history of the company. And as a result of that, we had an opportunity to bring 20-plus brands together in new and innovative ways to solve some really challenging problems in automotive and for our dealer clients. However, our enterprise technology organization at the time, we faced several challenges that we knew we needed to overcome to better enable our company's ability to integrate its products, which would innovate in the marketplace. So at the time, some of the challenges that we were facing, the word deliver, front and center in our vocabulary. Not necessarily a bad thing. However, we always seemed to focus on delivery at the expense of pay-down of technical debt and really focusing on improving the system of work. Most of our work was managed as projects, and as a result of that, it was limiting our ability to learn and flex to the rapidly evolving business. And at the time, our teams were using a lot of different tools to collaborate in different ways, and it made it very difficult to create visibility into the flow of our work across the organization. And our company's business strategy at the time was quickly changing and adapting, but our ways of working in enterprise technology at the time made it very challenging for us to stay in alignment with the rest of the organization. So as we got into 2016, we embarked on a journey to address those challenges. Our initial focus was to make the work visible across the entire organization with a single source of truth, so we could enable transparency and cross-collaboration at scale. Connecting our organization together to enable strategic alignment, both within enterprise technology and across our product portfolios, which would help us stay on the same page and all moving in the same direction. And then we needed to define clear prioritization criteria and faster high-quality decision-making within our organization. So off we went to shape these new ways of working. And it is August 2016. These are a few pictures from the Agile open event that our Cox Automotive product organization hosted. It was a two-day event using an open space technology format with participation from product, engineering, ourselves, enterprise technology. We also had lean agile practitioners and the business represented. And collectively, we were representing over 5,000 team members. We explored a variety of topics at that time related to our evolving ways of working. The product organization had decided to move forward with a delivery framework inspired by SAFe 4.0 to achieve the transparency, alignment, and improved prioritization that was needed. So we also considered adopting this framework in technology for our enterprise platforms. That is where we approach our first fork in the road. Should we copy, should we adopt the product development framework and ways of working for our internal enterprise platforms, or evaluate a framework that is fit for our context? At the time, we decided to go with consistency, and we learned a lot. We found that the SAFe 4-like framework was unnecessarily heavy for platform development, and that context, in this case, really should have outweighed consistency. As Jonathan Smart mentioned from his days at Barclays Bank, one of the things that they learned is that you want to achieve big through small. And instead of doing that, we had really tried to achieve big through big. And that resulted in a slowdown in decision-making, which was exactly the opposite of what we had intended to do. So what we did was we ended up descaling to enable decision-making closer to our teams while maintaining key components of the framework to ensure a common language with product development. Now, I would like to point out another important differentiation that we discovered between product development and our platforms teams, and that was the construct of the leadership core team unit. This core team structure was intended to solve for strategic alignment at scale, so the core teams needed to have the right decision-makers to enable faster, higher quality decisions. Seems like a great idea, though at the time, enterprise platforms did not have a product organization. So we attempted to resolve that by establishing a business process owner on the core team, and then we ran into an even bigger challenge. Who would represent the business? Indeed, we did, Nazia. Part of what we faced at this point as we helped these leadership teams form is we tried to identify one business leader that could really represent and provide the decision rights on that team. However, as we tried that and experimented with that approach, we learned that it wasn't working for us. The stakeholder landscape was just too broad and diverse. There were so many competing needs, lots of number ones, and in some cases, we didn't necessarily have a single person that could represent the needs of a particular area of our organization, like sales, for example. So with so many stakeholders and just so many opportunities we needed to chase, the role of a true product owner would navigate through all the complexity of our stakeholder landscape. And so this led us to the next fork in our road. So do we plan and manage projects the way we had been, leveraging the process owners to go out and gather requirements from our stakeholders? Or do we pivot into the left fork and really manage our internal platforms more like products, so we could change the way that we engage with this broad stakeholder community in our organization? So what we decided to do was stand up a product organization from scratch inside our enterprise platform space. We hired a product leader who came into Cox Automotive, has really built that product discipline within that area of our organization, and we shifted away from gathering requirements to partnering with our stakeholders to really understand their problems and enable their outcomes for their context. So this was great. We had this movement along. We were making a lot of progress going into 2018 with this revised model, but then we encountered a number of new changes that we had to deal with, didn't we, Nazia?

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: We did. So we're in 2018, and Cox Automotive renewed its strategic plan, which incorporated three horizons of growth, the digital revolution, the rise of mobility, and the autonomous era. So our vision was expanded to transforming the way the world buys, sells, owns, and uses cars to capture the age of mobility. As Cox Automotive stepped into its expanded vision, we in enterprise technology decided to learn from our stakeholders to align our strategy to the evolving business needs. And instead of hearing about how we can support an expanded vision, we actually got a lot of other feedback. The overall sentiment was okay. It was not bad, but it was definitely not where we needed to be. Some of our stakeholders knew us and they liked us, but they were confused about how to leverage us. Some would say that we were the police force. Some asked for support and really others resisted it. But above all, a common theme that we were getting back was that they felt that enterprise technology was slow and complex. So the three biggest takeaways that we summarized from our stakeholder feedback at the time was that we needed to adapt frequently to the evolving needs of our business in response to our expanded vision. We needed to simplify the system of work for our business partners and our own system of work, and we needed to enable new capabilities for Cox Automotive and be able to scale those capabilities effectively. So we faced our next fork in the road. We could have charged ahead. We certainly had great momentum from the improvements we had made to our delivery framework and by establishing the product focus. However, we had learned from our prior decisions that slower is sometimes faster. So in this case, we chose to pause and set our foundation. So from 2018 to 2019, we shaped a foundational transformation for enterprise technology by focusing on these five components, strategy as learning, focus on outcomes, voice of employee and voice of stakeholder, elevating our journey toward engineering excellence, and empowering our teams to own their journey of learning and continuous improvement. Dan and I are going to share insights into each, starting with strategy as learning. So the first thing we did in enterprise technology was to establish our mission to enable and scale Cox Automotive's business capabilities. We knew to do so, we needed to drive innovation for our customers and stakeholders, accelerate the business, create trust with our stakeholders, and establish an environment of learning and growth for our team members, all at scale to enable the enterprise. Then to connect strategy to execution, we embraced the strategy as learning approach. We shaped clear strategies and tactics for each of our service areas, and we unified our stakeholders around our goals. It was important for us to ensure that our strategy didn't become static, and that we would review our results regularly to challenge our assumptions, embed learnings, and adapt our strategies as needed to remain flexible to the needs of the business.

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: Indeed, and see this HBR article that's really helped influence our approach. And one of our early iterations of our framework really defined it was activate, plan, and execute strategy. But we knew that wasn't going to work for us because it didn't have that adapt cycle built in, and assumptions change, and we're operating in such a complex environment. So this article, one of the co-authors, Dr. Amy Edmondson, carries some deep insight into how to shape strategy as a working hypothesis that you constantly adjust based on emerging learnings. So this has been a big part of really influencing how we do strategy in enterprise technology, even today.

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: Which actually leads really nicely to our focus on outcomes, which is our second component. So once we had established our imperatives and our service strategies, we set key performance indicators that the whole organization could get behind. We aligned these KPIs to our imperatives and ensured that the metrics that we track with our service areas all have a corresponding impact on our KPIs. I'd like to think we actually have a pretty balanced approach to how we think about metrics, which was heavily influenced by another HBR article. Dan, do you remember when you first saw this article?

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: I do, and I've done this more than once in Cox Automotive, where the latest issue arrives in my home mailbox, and I look at the cover and there's an article that's just top of mind, and this one really sent me into the office to put this issue on Nazia's desk and really get our whole team to read it. It was called "Don't Let Metrics Undermine Your Business" and there's some key insight in this article that's really helped shape how we've rolled out our outcomes dashboard to make sure that the metrics don't become the strategy. Instead, the metrics help us see where we are with our strategy. So we developed a leadership workshop around this, around strategy alignment and communication, and how to treat metrics and outcomes dashboard in that manner. So we've learned a lot from that and getting some benefit from it as well.

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: And so we had our strategies and our KPIs defined, and I love these pictures because these remind me of how in 2019, we kicked things off in a really big way. There are a few photos from our town hall when our CIO, Mitch Gersten, shared the enterprise technology mission, new strategy, and our outcomes. We had our business partners talk about the problems they were facing and the role we would play in enabling great outcomes for the business. There were events throughout the week to align and generate excitement around enterprise technology. Dan, do you remember that?

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: Oh my goodness, you bet I do. I'm transported back into January of 2019. This was a huge week for us, and it's a week I'll never forget in my five years with Cox Automotive. There was so much energy, excitement. We had all kinds of events going around that week to really align folks to our new mission and strategy and outcomes. And at the same time, we got some tough questions, too. And that's good because that's the kind of culture we were trying to promote at the time, is this openness and transparency. We knew we didn't know what the future would hold, and we were operating under that assumption even as we stepped into this. And so hearing people talk through it in that way really created a lot of momentum for us as we went into the year.

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: Absolutely. And I really just want to emphasize that ensuring the enterprise technology organization is unified around our mission, strategies, and how we measure success was and continues to be a key focus of ours.

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: Yeah. And actually, that's a great segue to our third component, which is amplifying voice. So since 2019, we've established a regular cadence to hear from our stakeholders and team members through a very simple stakeholder NPS and employee NPS survey format. What's most important to highlight is the bias to action and improvement we've driven by establishing a quarterly learning cycle. We gather scores and sentiments, analyze the data to identify opportunities, establish a two-way dialogue with our stakeholders and team members to share the improvements we're committing to, action those improvements, and then see how we're doing. Our survey engagement continues to be very high due to the tangible improvements we've made. This continued effort has gone a really long way in establishing trust with our stakeholders and driving a great team member experience. And that leads us to inspire engineering excellence bigger than I'm super passionate about, really big on our DevOps journey. And so with inspire engineering excellence, to set some context for this, it's important to know that our teams, particularly in our enterprise platform space, they were coming from years of waterfall delivery type projects, and even our engineering managers were accustomed to focusing on delivery. Were they delivery managers or were they engineering leaders? So this was a big paradigm shift for all of us. And 2018's "Accelerate" has really energized our colleagues, and that great book has been making the rounds across our organization, and it's helped us really develop this version of our engineering excellence framework. And dating back a year ago to now, we've gone all in on that pillar on the left, capability strength. And part of what we're doing with that is we've implemented a learning cycle, and we've been piloting this in engineering, and we're seeing some really encouraging results. And so what we've done with this is we took the capabilities from "Accelerate", did some change and adaptation based on feedback. So thank you to the authors of "Accelerate" for all that great inspiration. And then we've implemented this learning cycle with engineering. And so what they do is they self-assess themselves on where their capabilities are, where their strengths are, and where they know they want to go and invest in further adoption of capabilities or even advancing capabilities that they've already adopted. Everything from automation to development practices and more. And then as they shape those adoption goals, they go out and they try, they learn, they fail, and improve from there. And that whole process really leads them to come to the back end of the cycle, where they can go back and reassess where they are, look at their performance outcomes and how those have changed, and then use that to inform what capabilities do they go on next and to repeat that cycle. So we've piloted this in the organization. We're getting really encouraging feedback on it, and we've been learning a lot from it as well. So really excited about where we are with this. And oh, by the way, you will not find the word mature anywhere in our engineering capability model. We know that the journey never ends, and we've been really big and really changing the way we choose to use words to describe just constant learning and growth in this space. And so that leads us to empower our teams, our fifth component here. And so with empower our teams, this quote from John Smart and several of his Deloitte colleagues, great white paper here, "Business Agility in Retail Banking" was published earlier in the year. "An agile mindset means not being prescriptive on the how, but rather empowering teams to achieve the desired outcomes." This absolutely rings true in our empowerment journey at scale and enterprise technology. And so to set the stage for this, a big component has been for us to enable the structure, process, and culture where empowerment flows up into our teams and the reality flows down into our senior leaders. So we flip the system to put our teams on the top and put more and more of that empowerment in their hands so that they can seek an understanding of their team health in their context. They're empowered to understand and self-solve their own problems, and they're becoming outcome subject matter experts for their space. And then our managers, their role is really key in this to seek understanding of system health and look across the broader system. And rather than driving or managing delivery, they're now starting to listen and learn and use things like the Gemba Walk to go and understand the opportunities at the point of value work and be curious and foster these environments of psychological safety so that our team members can be open and vocal about the story behind our data and where the opportunities live. And our senior leaders, huge role here. Clearly, they foster strong metrics practice across the entire space. And on behalf of all of our leaders, they are modeling the desired behavior that others are learning from and starting to model as well. And very important, in order to empower our teams deeper into the system, we have to give them the knowledge and the context to be able to do that. So our senior leaders spend time with our organization to educate and provide clarity on our strategy and our direction and broader things going on across the organization, so that knowledge and context can be really provided for those teams so they can own and self-solve problems in their space. So very excited about that. So those are our five foundational transformation components for enterprise technology, and we'd love to share examples of how each of these components has come to life. So starting with strategy as learning approach, this played a critical role earlier this year as we navigated through the first few months of the pandemic. We were able to very quickly pivot our strategy and adjust to the rapidly shifting needs of the business. We were able to create trust with our stakeholders through transparency to our performance, which has resulted in game-changing conversations with our stakeholders that we weren't able to have before. And then our efforts at amplifying voice has resulted in a statistically significant improvement in our stakeholder and team member experience through that learning cycle and bias to action. Really exciting benefits here. And to build on it further in inspire engineering excellence, we piloted this approach almost a year ago to the day with a self-assessment for our Salesforce teams in sales and service. And over the past year, they've been on an active journey into DevOps adoption, automation practices, the culture of DevOps. And as a result of that, we've seen some big wins in their space. Over the past year, they've been able to double the number of releases that they can deploy on a monthly basis, and they've been able to cut their open defect count on a quarterly basis by 90%. So big wins there, really excited and so happy and thrilled for our team members there. We're using that success story to really influence broader adoption of that capability model so we can drive collective knowledge and learning across the organization. And then team ownership and action. This is empowering our teams at the local level. Our teams now are demonstrating a shared understanding of what it means to take action for their own continuous improvement journey. There was a time and a place when sometimes we would wait for a manager or leader to come in and review the metrics and tell them what to do. Well, now, with that empowerment in play, we can move faster, we can make quicker decisions, and we can really get that reality into the broader organization. And our shift to work from home has been really key around this as well. Our outcomes dashboard, our empowerment models helped us sustain a highly transparent and engaged way of working, even in our virtual setting today.

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: And just to recap, we had paused and focused on our foundation because we wanted to make sure we had positioned ourselves in the best way possible to enable Cox Automotive's vision and really delight our customers and stakeholders. So do you remember that slide that we shared earlier with all of the mixed stakeholder sentiment emojis? Well, in a year, we have experienced a meaningful 26% improvement in our stakeholder Net Promoter score, and that is supported by sentiments demonstrating clear alignment between the business and IT, and appreciation of the speed, simplification, and innovation that we're driving. For us, there's really no better gauge than hearing from our customers, and enabling their success is what we've set out to achieve. So this progress to date is definitely encouraging. We've also had significant improvement in our employee Net Promoter score. Our team members are feeling supported, happier, more empowered, and express a high degree of trust and confidence in the enterprise technology strategic direction.

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: Love it. And such an exciting set of benefits that we've witnessed since getting on this transformation journey. However, we're not getting complacent. There's more we're going after now and in the very near future. We're living through the Phoenix project right now in IT infrastructure and operations. Such a great group of teams and our leaders over there. First step, our Bill Palmer, our version of Bill Palmer, started earlier this year, has made the work visible, and we're active in transformation in that space. More to come and more to share in a future experience report. And our outcomes dashboard, continuing to iterate and develop and improve that based on feedback and new learnings. So we're actually going to be bringing in flow efficiency into that, and that's part of a broader initiative around lean thinking adoption across not only enterprise technology, but also our Cox Automotive product group. And then our engineering excellence rollout. As I mentioned earlier, we've got a great success story. We've been sharing that. We do expect that to drive a much broader adoption of our capability model and more. And then our leader experience. So we've been in the process of reimagining how leaders show up in an enterprise technology context. It's such a complex organizational space that we work in every single day. So we have a whole leadership development program and journey all ready to go. We're getting our leaders on that journey here starting in Q4. Really excited about that and looking forward to see what we learn there. So as we reflect on our whole journey up to date, a little bit of advice we'd offer to others who are maybe facing similar challenges. If it's not disruptive, you're not doing it right. Consistency, we made that decision early on. It wasn't very disruptive, and we weren't getting the benefits. And you have to balance context with consistency. It's super key to make sure that we empower teams within context to make decisions and not apply a one size fits all approach, but consistency is needed in certain cases as well. So just all about balance. And then that atmosphere of learning, right? Driving that culture of psychological safety every single day. It has to be nurtured every day. It's always a work in progress. It's easy to take a step back. So never get complacent with that. You want to always be working on that and modeling those desired behaviors of curiosity and openness that really foster that thriving environment for your teams.

Nazia Ali

Nazia Ali: Wonderful. So to conclude our presentation, Dan and I want to leave you with an infographic that the enterprise technology senior leadership team created early this year as we were impacted by the pandemic and thrust into this work from home environment. Our leadership team at the time took a step back to make sure we were starting each day with what matters the most, and we conveyed these sentiments across our organization. So as we all adjust to our new normal, this is a takeaway we wanted to share with other technology leaders as we're all navigating through what's really a very difficult time. Thank you so much for joining our session. We really appreciate everyone participating. We're looking forward to seeing all of you at the rest of the DevOps Summit, and we will be on Slack to continue the conversation.

Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan: You bet. And thanks again for attending our presentation today. Really looking forward to collaborating with everyone at the rest of the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Have a great time, and thanks again for being here in our presentation today.