Edmunds Mission, Purpose & Impact

Tell me more about your role in building this appraisal tool.

I’m primarily in charge of the back-end development for the tools. My team incorporates APIs that are provided by CarMax and other partners into our systems. This way, the website and the product that we’re building can use those APIs to gather user information, and use it to obtain instant offers from CarMax on behalf of our customers.

What has collaboration looked like on this project?

Each of us heavily collaborated. The project kicked off just before the pandemic, so the majority of the time we’ve been fully remote. Prior to the pandemic, Edmunds was remote-friendly. We were accustomed to Zoom calls and collaborating online and offline. We relied on Google Docs, Slack and Jira. There were several developers working on this project, some of them offshore in Belarus. We balanced the challenge of collaborating with different time zones.

Edmunds has a very open and collaborative culture. All opinions are welcome. Different opinions and feedback make our product more functional, robust and maintainable.

Have any of you used this appraisal tool in your personal life? 

I used the tool in the early phase of the product when I tried to sell my brother’s car in July 2020. The car was very new, a 2020 Toyota Camry. At the time, our appraisal tool couldn’t provide an offer for very new cars. But that has since changed! We can now make instant offers on cars up to 2021 model years.

"Before we launched this instant offer appraisal program, the only way to get an appraisal from CarMax was to drive your car to a CarMax dealership and have somebody conduct a thorough inspection of your vehicle. Our solution streamlines the process and makes it convenient for consumers to get an appraisal wherever they are. Give it a try and go online. It will take you minutes to get a firm, real offer on your car - an offer that CarMax will honor as long as the information that you provide is accurate."

Tell me more about your role in building this appraisal tool.

Michelle Reuven and I work closely together. We were the original hands-on product managers defining the user experience. We define the features that we want to build and test. A lot of the work is having empathy for the user and understanding their pain points. Then, it’s building a hypothesis and testing and iterating on the site to improve the user experience. We work very closely with our design team to design that user experience, and then work closely with the development team to build and launch these iterations.

What’s an exciting project you’re working on right now?

We’re working on a new product that will give our customers the ability to track their car’s value over time. We’ve launched a minimum viable product (MVP) that’s going out to a limited audience. Using this tool, you can enter your car information to see how the value changes each month, and use that information to decide whether it’s the right time to buy or sell. This idea is in its infancy, but it’s something that we’re really excited about.