Cheeky Chats with Louis Badcock

Cheeky Chats is a series where I ask Tech Leaders the same three quick-fire questions. The idea is to have a brief conversation with someone in the office kitchen or at a coffee shop.

For the first Cheeky Chat, I sat down with Louis Badcock, Chief Product Officer at Runa; previously Group Product Director and my former boss. Louis is an experienced Product Leader passionate about solving customer problems and working out the right thing to build. His mantra: love the customer problem you're trying to solve - not your own ideas!

VENESSA:  Hi Louis, thank you for your time. Welcome to Cheeky Chats, where I'll be asking you three quick-fire questions. So my first question is: what is the hardest thing you've had to do in the last year?

LOUIS BADCOCK: I think trying to keep the team motivated in times of unknown. We've been through all the budget stuff and there's been a lot of change. I think trying to have everyone remember the mission of why we're here. It's easy during the good times, it's kind of easy because we're working on exciting stuff, we're working on big bold initiatives and it's engaging. In the harder times, it's much harder to remind people of the mission but it's so important as well. And I think we've lost a bit of momentum, it's still a very exciting mission. It's not just a used car dealership. It's a fundamentally different way of selling this product that is definitely ten times better than the old way of doing it. So I think keeping people engaged with that and also reminding people [of that]. I think people often feel like we've got these company initiatives that we're doing, and people feel like, what impact can I have? How can I change this or change that? And, just trying to remind your team that, you know what, people do sit up and take notice of data. And if you've got a great compelling story or an argument that we should do this instead of that — we will change direction, we have done that before, and we'll do it again. So I think, keeping people reminded of that when times are hard and challenging economically that has been very hard.

VENESSA: What is your top learning in the last three years?

LOUIS: We've done some amazing things when I think actually right from the beginning: we got the website up and running in like, under five months; we went on to do a real-time consumer finance proposition, which was cutting edge at a time; we did subscriptions; we did a We Buy Any Car competitor; international launch... We did a lot of these things in pretty short timescales, a quarter, maybe a bit longer than a quarter. Whereas other companies would have taken a lot longer, maybe years, to do what we did in a fraction of the time. And I think one of the reasons we were successful in doing that is through focus. 

Basically, the whole company was behind and focused on clear initiatives that weren't in conflict with each other. You can say what you like about our process and how well or not we've done that. But actually, we did pretty well, focusing on this is the thing that matters right now and everyone's striving to achieve a common goal.

And you could argue that was a more straightforward thing to do when you're a smaller startup. The fact that we were able to carry that spirit on and that focus on with these other initiatives post-launch of that and do it again, and again, that was amazing.  And actually when we slow down and where things got complicated and stopped working so well for us was, when we lost some of that focus. 

So that's something I'm taking with me to my next role: how can we make sure the company is super clear on what it's trying to achieve and really focused on ideally one, big hairy thing, not multiple things, because I think when you do that, you move fast and deliver great things.

VENESSA: Yeah, I definitely think that just having that one, clear goal that everyone can see and everyone can work towards means that you just kind of just get on with it. I think launching Cazoo in the EU was a good example even though it was huge and crazy. The whole company was behind it, and we achieved it. That's what I love about working at Cazoo, everyone is bought into the mission and the vision of the company as everyone just has this common goal of making it a success, I think it's, like, a cultural thing as well. 

LOUIS: And it's so important when you're also bigger because they were important also during that time we scaled massively, we got to, four and a half thousand maybe and 5,000 people at one stage today we're still like 1500. Having that commonality is so important when you've got so many people because if you don't have it, [it increases] the chances of it becoming very corporate, which you've seen in many big corporates — people working against each other, politics... You get a lot more of that. 

VENESSA: Yeah, definitely. My last question is what would you say is your superpower?

LOUIS: So I'm not sure. I'm very simple-minded, there's this complexity in everything that we do and we deliver. Technology has a hell of a lot [of] complexity. What we work on has so much to think about and so many strands, whether it's the technology, whether it's the customer experience, whether it's legal consideration, operations, whatever it is. I think I'm quite good at boiling things down to very basic, simple things. I think it's kind of how my mind works, for better or worse, but I find it hard to be able to make decisions or to motivate people or tell a story if I can't boil it down to a really simple set of things. Because I think like that, I think that probably is my super power because when I approach things, when there is complexity or there's just a lot of noise going on, I'm pretty good at being able to zoom back out and just say why we’re doing this and actually, how is that? How is that going to work? Because if I can't explain it to myself in simple terms, I start to worry actually, can anyone else? And actually do we really know what we're doing here or are we going in the wrong direction? I don't know how it happens, but it's just part of how I think. There’s so much noise in life. I like to cut through the noise.

VENESSA: I would say you're very pragmatic and practical. Especially when you've got a big organization you need to make it simple. So people can understand each other and if it's too complicated. That's one of my key takeaways definitely that I've learned from you.

LOUIS: Awesome. Thank you. I think in technology, it's especially pressing. People in our business want to do this and then we say, 

“Well actually, it's gonna take two months.” 

“How is it going to take two months? It's just this, surely it's simple?” 

I can see their perspective. I can see why they think that but we have to translate. We have to use clear and non-technical language to articulate the actual things we’d build and say:
“The reason it's complicated is because you have to do this and this”

When you lay those things out they are often quite boring or simple things but you have to explain them and people respond, “Oh yeah. Yeah actually, I haven't thought [about that].” 

You have to think about systems and processes and if you're not involved in building software, then you tend to think it's really easy. Especially with all of these demos that we're seeing now of, you know, wireframes, turning into real websites in minutes.

Bonus Question round

VENESSA: What do you think is the future of design?

LOUIS: Well yeah. This is a big topic, isn't it? And how about the future of coding as well? But I don't know, I'm not an expert. I've got no idea! I haven’t given it much thought but I think increasingly what these tools do is generate stuff:: whether it's design, whether it's code, whether it's essay writing, whatever it is, they can just spit it out like that. I think the skill is going to be less on the generation and more on the curation and the editing. And actually understanding of how these things fit together and work together.

VENESSA: You've got things being generated but what about the ethics around it? Who ensures that the design is ethical and works for all users. So I think the role of designers will then turn more into creating frameworks and the guardrails and like you said that editing side of things. I think that quality and creativity could be lost in design. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens, or how you reclaim that. What do you think the shape of a tech company would be with all these AI tools?

LOUIS: I think it could look a bit different. I had a very tangible example. Yesterday I was chatting with a product manager I mentor. And he was saying how a friend of his isan engineer and he's got his own website but hasn't got time to build everything himself. And so when he is coding new pages, he'll often pay a junior engineer to do something like add the analytics. and it would be done over a couple of months.

Now he's asked ChatGPT to generate the analytics  code for him and he was able to create a website in a single day. And that is just like, wow. And so some of these more simple tasks suddenly become a lot easier,cheaper and quicker to do. I think this has really interesting ramifications to building software, as these things are risky and take cost and time. But if we can make the process quicker, if you can create better prototypes faster and cheaper now, that is a very interesting proposition.

It could squeeze more junior roles. Going unchecked, this has the potential to really widen the gaps and increase diversity issues because you only need really experienced specialists who can cut through the crap that comes back from the generative models, reducing the opportunities for more inexperienced people..  However, equally it could go the other way as well. It could speed up the development of newbies into this stuff because you're working with something that can give you ideas and it's a much faster way of generating code and content.

I think it will change the market andmaybe it will mean smaller team sizes.

VENESSA: Yeah. I've been thinking would it mean you'd have more senior people.  I feel like the Product trio (Product Manager, Product Designer and Engineer) might still exist. But then I mean do you still need like a QA? For example, do you need all those engineers? Probably not. You'll have leaner teams and then I guess like the thing that I've been thinking about recently is there is a trend of the design function reporting into product. So eventually you could see it going to where you don't need design anymore because you've got ChatGPT. And then if a product manager is able to basically do the basics of research, where is that space for a designer and what does that kind of look like?

I think where design can shine is in strategy and how it can ladder up to the business goals. Designers definitely need to be a lot more commercial now. Otherwise, they're going to become extinct

LOUIS: Yeah. I agree with that, but I would imagine that the product trio is still a thing. It is so complicated building software and it’s essential to understand the context of your company, your business and your customers; so even with the best generative tools doing design and engineering, I'm pretty sure there's always going to be a place for expert human input.

VENESSA: Yeah, I think so. You can't preempt what humans are going to do. Like you could have as much technology around it as possible, you could do as much research as you want to validate but as soon as it goes out to the market, you don't know what's gonna happen.

LOUIS: Exactly. You just don't.

VENESSA: You have no clue, so I think you're right. You're definitely gonna need some human input, but it's more at that expert level. I wonder if it becomes more around the journeys and the kind of frameworks around a design rather than the kind of design side of it and then that almost ladders up to that UX strategy and peace, right?

LOUIS: Yeah, and maybe optimistically it will raise the bar on user experience and product design overall because,these tools help you get to where you want to go to faster with a wider array of considerations and just a better standard overall. Hopefully, it is actually an additive thing rather than a negative thing.

VENESSA: Yeah I think so. I think it could possibly do that, I will be interested to see how those short courses change and evolve.

I've always thought there a controversial kind of tension around those short courses because obviously I've come from a traditional background of going to give three years and you know, starting from Junior working my way up. However, right now the market is  just flooded with a lot of people doing short courses because UX is in fashion. So yeah, it's very interesting debate that you can have. But anyway, thank you for being my Cheeky Chat guest

LOUIS: You're welcome. Thank you.