3. A 2 year journey at CarsGuide…
• Establishing an Agile execution culture
• Establishing an Agile innovation culture
5. The need for Agility
1. Agility is required to be responsive to the
speed of change
2. Agility is also a pre-requisite to building an
innovation culture in an established venture
6. Year 1 focus – Execution
Purpose
People
Place
Platform
Process
“Five P’s”
7. Scorecard - October 2013
Purpose
People
Place
Platform
Process
Negatives
• Lack of internal trust
• Loose delivery process
• Inflexible roadmaps
• Missing roles and poor morale
• Legacy platform and operations
• ‘No time’ to innovate
Positives
• Some good technical people
• Strong audience and brand
name
10. People
• Created small, cross functional teams (product +
technology)
• Adjusted mix of roles and skills where needed
• Accountable as a team for meeting KPI objectives
• Diversity of backgrounds
11. Place
• Co-location – leveraged wherever possible
• Collaboration - essential to support Agile work and
innovation
12. Platform
• Significant focus in year 1 at CarsGuide
• Agility requires platform to be scalable, robust
and to allow for experimentation
• Content and search platforms, analytics and
operations all needed refresh, along with a
major brand and product relaunch
13. Process
• Key issue in Year 1
• Adopted Lean-Agile
principles
• Deliver business value
early
• Learn with incremental
delivery
• Build in Quality
• Collaborative re-
prioritisation
15. Scorecard - October 2014
Purpose
People
Place
Platform
Process
Positives
• Internal trust improving
• Purpose clarified with brand
relaunch
• Clear Agile process + DevOps
• Significant platform progress
(CMS, search, cloud, responsive
web)
Negatives
• Some roles still new (e.g. UX)
• Some burnout in teams
• Office space still sub-optimal
• Technical debt hampering future
agility
16. Year 2 focus – Innovation
1. Innovation is 99% iteration to discover best
way to create value
2. Innovation is typically a team sport
Agile culture supports both of these well
17. Sources of Ideas
“750 Global CEOs reported that only 14% of
their innovation ideas came from traditional
R&D. Instead, 41% came from employees and
36% came from customers…”
21. An observation on Scarcity
• Scarcity fosters innovation -
look at startups
• Understand value of
constraints – time, resources,
money etc.
• If you don’t have scarcity in
the right areas - create some!
22. Scorecard - October 2015
Purpose
People
Place
Platform
Process
Positives
• Mutual Trust
• Customer and data driven
feeding product roadmaps
• Office space more collaborative
• Native apps launched on API
• Sustainable pace and velocity
increased
Negatives
• More to do on platform to be
fully agile (expand API + Test
Automation)
23. Summary
1. Agility is essential to respond to speed of
change
2. Agility requires investment in Purpose,
People, Platform, Place and Process
3. Scarcity fosters innovation – embrace (and
apply) constraints