Shawn Chung Kim

Carvana is an online used-car shopping platform that empowers automotive shoppers to purchase a car entirely online. Root and Carvana have partnered to offer car buyers insurance to purchase in three clicks so they don’t have to go through the insurance-switching process and potentially not get their cars delivered on time. In this role, I oversaw a team of product managers on the onboarding flow, legal, and privacy and collaborated with the Carvana team to successfully embed Root’s product offering.

O2O (online to offline and offline to online) is a business program launched by Nike as a part of its corporate strategy to serve up more direct-to-consumer business. The O2O marketplace platform enables tracking every piece of inventory in every shipping node Nike has and calculates the most efficient way to deliver the right product to the customer. The platform allows features like “ship from store,” “ship from node,” “buy online, pick up in store,” “buy in the store, return online,” and many other ways to make Nike consumers’ lives easier.

Up until 2016, Edmunds’ leadership team decided that the site needed a more modern aesthetic appeal and new technology. The website’s ad and page load times were not performant. Edmunds set out to fix these problems and sell new ad spaces to its trusted clients. In just one year, Edmunds was able to achieve the launch of this new site based on a hybrid of the old and latest technology, eventually being able to serve all of the pre-sold ads and performing as expected.

This project included over 120 employees, spanning six product scrum teams, a project team, SEO, marketing, Tier 1 advertising, sales, and more. A project of this size was an unprecedented experience for many at Edmunds, and we overcame many challenges, such as scope setting, untested Ad platform, and technical challenges as we were migrating to a new, mobile responsive coding platform. We overcame these challenges by prioritizing revenue-generating pages, working with sales and product teams to win over our customer trust, and constantly creating a hybrid environment on our platform migration plans.

Our team delivered a suite of comprehensive tools designed to empower automotive dealers with valuable insights to sell their cars faster and better. With this suite of tools, dealers will have access to a range of features that enable them to make data-driven decisions, optimize their pricing strategy, and easily connect with customers.

While working as a group of three scrum teams, we managed to overcome many hurdles, such as setting the right deadline while being agile, deciding on the right MVP and product growth strategy, acquisition of a company (under NDA) and integrating their Ruby codebase into our Java platform, and other personal conflicts and differences that made the project high-friction.

We overcame these differences by achieving excellence in operating structure, figuring out how to correctly divide and conquer, and getting ruthless with our prioritizations. We iterated over and over again until we got this right.

This ultimately propelled our dealer sales from $0 to $100 million in ARR in just five short years, as dealers were able to confidently sign up with Edmunds knowing that we’d provide them with all the tools they needed to price competitively and succeed.