3 things I have learnt since joining Cazoo

I joined Cazoo in April this year, moving from a small start-up to a start-up in hyper-growth felt a bit daunting, but I knew I was ready for a challenge. There is genuinely no other place like Cazoo and you find yourself challenged in surprisingly different ways, hence the lack of posts tail end of this year. 

Typically this is the season that you start to reflect on the past year, and I thought it might be a good time to reflect on my 8 months at Cazoo. So here are 3 things I have learnt since joining Cazoo.

1. Lean into what you are good at - it’s your superpower

This lesson is one of those things I hear often, but I never truly practised or focused on it until working at Cazoo. Working in a fast-growing company with so many new people joining, you can feel like one of many. As more UX managers joined and the company got bigger it began to feel a bit crowded. All of a sudden you have other UX managers trying to build profiles and establish themselves within the company, I started to feel overwhelmed and started to question my skills and ability as a UX manager. 

Once you start to feel like this there are 2 things you should do:

1. Gather 360 feedback to understand what you are doing well and what you can improve on. The positive feedback is great for giving you confidence in what you are doing well. The feedback around what you can improve on is great for pinpointing areas for development.

2. The second and the one I want to focus on is to understand what makes you great at what you do. Everyone has different talents and understanding and focusing on mine helped me to feel less overwhelmed and to not compare myself to others.

I would be lying if I don’t have those moments of this person is doing that perhaps I should be thinking of doing that? Does that make me a bad manager if I am not doing x like this person is doing? The way I tackle those things is to ask myself is there a need? What is the benefit of doing this? How will it impact the team? Once you can answer those questions in a positive manner then it might be an opportunity to introduce them.

Focusing on your talent means that you create in your own lane and create your own path and style of the role. There is no one way to perform a role so don’t compare yourself to others and try to copy what they are doing. Your style and way of doing things are based on many different factors and often you have to adapt your ways of doing things on the team and people you are working with. 

Use your talent to help others in your team, maybe you are great at storytelling to use your talent to help the team become better storytellers. This helps to establish your role amongst a team and also become the go-to person to help others improve.

2. The art of delegation

When you are new you want to show everyone that you have everything in control. There can be a tendency to take on everything yourself, I soon discovered it is not scalable. It stops you from growing into other development areas and stops people in your team from taking on new responsibilities and giving them development opportunities. 

I found myself in this situation and started to get feedback that I needed to focus more on being strategic. I realised that in order for me to do this I need to delegate some of my responsibilities to some of my team. I big chunk of my time was spent on hiring, the team have a good idea of our team culture and the domain that I could let go of hiring and trust the team to make decisions. When thinking about things to offload think about:

1. What can you offload that takes you away from the key things you should be focusing on

2. What can only you do and you can’t delegate to others

3. Who in your team would it be a good development opportunity for?

Once you have worked out the above you can delegate it out, one thing that is important is to set up expectations and make sure you are checking so that they feel supported and it is how you want it to be.

3. Drive things forward yourself

Often you see a few gaps that either hasn’t been picked up or is missing. Typically people raise this and then try and get the team involved to make it happen. What I realised is that although it’s ideal to get the team to contribute so that you get everyone’s input, it is not always possible as people are busy and it takes time to try and get everyone’s availability. 

Instead of getting frustrated with lack of progress, I have started to drive things forward myself by doing a proposal or first draft and then sharing for comment. I find this is a great way to get things moving as peers can review in their own time.

So there you have it, these are 3 things I learnt during my 8 months at Cazoo so far. It’s always good to reflect on previous learning and I hope this means that you can shortcut and take my learnings to help aid your career development.