Technology is quite literally the business for Cars.com. The online automotive classified site serves more than 20 million car shoppers each month, many of whom use their mobile phones to navigate to the site or the company’s iPhone and Android apps.
Technology and product are so entwined inside Cars.com that the two divisions are overseen by the same person. Bill Swislow is senior vice president of product and chief information officer for Cars.com. He has guided the site since it was launched in 1998. In this interview, Swislow shares how Cars.com stays so in tune with its customers, the importance of making sure technical staff has a voice in business decisions, and more.
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): How important is IT to Cars.com?
Bill Swislow: Technology is so fundamental to core products for us. The service we’re providing is essentially content, but content that requires a lot of tools and a lot of functionality to really take advantage of it. The company's growth is enabled by technology and creativity in bringing new technologies to bear. Our product and technology organizations are very closely linked. I actually oversee both, and that’s by design – to try to eliminate the political friction that can exist between the two. Product and technology teams and product and technology management spend a lot of time together. We work together to brainstorm new ideas, and to identify and prioritize what really makes sense for the business.
TEP: You’ve talked before about the importance of CIOs looking at mobile as a business opportunity and driving strategy there. Where’s a good place to start?
Swislow: The baseline is understanding your customers and understanding what they’re going to expect to be able to do on their mobile device. After that, you have the option of taking a creative leap and thinking about where technology is going and identifying creative solutions that can be developed for your customers using that technology.
You don’t want to be defensive against mobile. There’s a universe of possibilities, but if you’re only thinking about security issues and provisioning employees, you’re missing out on real business opportunities.
TEP: What are some of the ways Cars.com works to understand its customers and the nature of their interactions with your brand?
Swislow: We have three primary customer groups. We have consumers who are the audience for our site. And on the B2B side, we have car dealers and we also have automakers who buy advertising from us. Those are all customer groups and there are very different issues with keeping track of them.
For consumers, we do extensive user testing. We have a usability lab in-house where we bring consumers at least once a week. We watch them through one-way glass, talk to them about our interfaces, and get their feedback on whatever it is we’re working on. We also survey consumers continuously on the site, and we take their feedback seriously. We do other kinds of consumer survey work as well.
TEP: And how do you stay connected with your B2B customers?
Swislow: With car dealers, we get a lot of feedback through our sales channels or calling on car dealers through our customer service organization. We track those interactions. We also survey our car dealers and we send folks from our product and technology organizations on ride-alongs with our sales reps. They visit the dealerships and watch as the sales reps interact with customers. We also have panels, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews with dealers. We have a pretty big investment in that kind of customer research.
TEP: It’s interesting that you invite technology team members on these ride-alongs. Why do you feel that’s important?
Swislow: Our consumer research is beneficial to more than just our marketing and product people. To the extent possible, we try to keep our technology staff engaged at some level. Another thing we do is co-locate our product managers with our development teams, and I always encourage our developers and technical staff to speak up on business considerations.
TEP: Do you find that your technical staff does speak up?
Swislow: We really encourage our various development teams to be open and honest about what they’re thinking and to understand and contribute to the business. We don’t want them to feel like that’s someone else’s job. One thing that has driven me crazy over the years is when you have an ace programmer who finishes a project and says something like, “You know, I can’t believe we did it that way, because there’s a much better way.” And I’m not talking about coding, I’m talking about some user interface design decision or business choice. The developers in the trenches doing the coding often have a lot more perspective and wisdom than they’re willing to speak up and talk about. Some of them do speak up, and that’s what we encourage.
TEP: Cars.com is clearly doing a lot right with mobile, but are there any challenges that you’re facing?
Swislow: The challenge with our mobile strategy today is that while our mobile products are really good and receive really good use, they don’t incorporate everything that’s on the desktop site. Users expect to do whatever they want to do on whatever device they’re using. An increasing number of people go to our desktop site from their phones, but it’s not an optimal experience. We believe it’s absolutely essential to make it easy for people to get to any content or functionality that they want, no matter what device they’re using. So that’s in flight now.
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In his role as Senior Vice President of Product and Chief Information Officer, Bill Swislow oversees all aspects of the Cars.com product and technology teams. He has guided the site's development since its inception in 1997.
