Riding the unicorn - how Cazoo builds for scale and growth

Over the past 18 months, Cazoo has gone from being a fledgling ecommerce startup with an ambition to transform the way people buy 2nd hand cars, to today being a multinational automotive retailer, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, valued at $7bn.

As one of the biggest success stories during the pandemic, how has the organisation achieved this phenomenal growth? We are thrilled to welcome Bob Gregory, Chief Architect for Cazoo to this fireside chat where we’ll delve into the technical, organisational and architectural decisions that were made, the rationale behind them, and some of the outcomes that have sustained and accelerated the business as it grows at unparalleled scale.

During the session, we’ll discuss:

• The Cazoo architecture - why an AWS Serverless Event-Driven paradigm was chosen, the importance of a strong technical vision and how this has helped to guide architectural decisions
• Platform as a Product - how Cazoo has established Platform teams as enablers for other teams
• Embracing change (Evolutionary Architecture)
• Building a successful MVP for an initial launch
• Architecting for scalability
• Build vs Buy
• Using the RFC process (Request for Comments) for internal decision making
• Building a world-class team - the importance of the right culture, skills and process to maintain velocity and motivation and avoid churn
• Successful integrations due to acquisition of other businesses
• Lessons learned
• What’s next in the evolution of Cazoo

Speakers

Bob Gregory

Chief Architect, Cazoo

Bob has a decade of experience building distributed systems and event driven architectures at Huddle, MADE, and now Cazoo.

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Steve Lydford

Regional Director, Codurance

Steve is a Software Craftsman and author with over 20 years professional experience.

During his career, Steve has worked on projects in a wide variety of sectors including retail e-commerce, finance, education, media, government and healthcare, developing large-scale, resilient, distributed systems on an assortment of platforms.

Steve is a pragmatic problem solver with a focus on the delivery of high-quality, robust and maintainable code. He is a passionate advocate of continuous improvement, both for software and software developers and believes that the future success of the software industry relies on the sharing of knowledge gained through experience.

twitter.com/stevelydford

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Matt Belcher (Facilitator)

Principal Craftsperson, Codurance

Matt is passionate about helping organisations improve their software delivery capabilities, whether it be through embedding good technical practices or establishing a clear technical vision. Prior to Codurance, Matt worked at ThoughtWorks, where he worked with a large number of clients across many locations, tech stacks, languages and technical architectures. He has been working closely with Cazoo, collaborating on the architectural direction and decisions to support building at scale.

twitter.com/matt_p_belcher

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