By Paul Nunnereley

In the world of product development, we usually talk about “the customer” as a distant figure—someone we study through data points and occasional interviews. But what happens when your customers are the people sitting at the desk next to you?

In a recent episode of the Auto Trader Product & Technology Podcast, I sat down with Maggie Mugs to discuss the “Inside Job” of CX (Customer Experience) and why building for colleagues is both a “magnetic” challenge and a high-stakes responsibility.

What is CX at Auto Trader?

While many see CX as purely “Customer Experience,” we view it through the lens of the Three Cs:

  1. Consumers: People shopping for cars.
  2. Customers: The retailers selling them.
  3. Colleagues: The internal teams supporting the entire marketplace [00:02:18].

When we talk about “Service Design,” we aren’t just looking at a digital interface. We are looking at the experience “end-to-end and top-to-bottom”—from a button on a website to the real-world moment a person in a van shows up at your house [00:03:03].

The Ecosystem: Moving from Solos to a Band

Often, internal tooling starts as a collection of “localized initiatives”—a specific CRM here, a marketing tool there. It’s like a band where everyone is playing a solo at the same time [00:08:58].

Our goal in CX is to move away from a “transactional” relationship (where a team makes a request and tech fulfills it) and toward a “relational” one. We want to understand the jobs people are doing so we can ensure the whole ecosystem plays the same music [00:11:12].

The Build vs. Buy Dilemma: The “Hospital” Analogy

One of the toughest parts of tech leadership is deciding whether to build a bespoke solution or buy a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product like HubSpot or Zendesk. I like to use a city infrastructure analogy:

  • The GP (COTS): Great for a “sore thumb” or standard processes. It’s nearby, efficient, and handles 80% of what you need [00:19:28].
  • The Hospital (Bespoke): If you need a complex, unique business process, you head to the hospital.
  • The Infrastructure: The most important part is the “road” between them—how naturally we weave these systems together so colleagues aren’t jumping through hoops just to do their jobs [00:21:03].

The “IKEA Bias” and the Trap of Over-Customization

As engineers, we all suffer from the IKEA Bias: we love the sofa more because we built it ourselves [00:29:34]. It’s easy to think we can build a better ticketing system than a multi-billion dollar company, but we have to ask: Does this generate revenue for our business? If we spend all our time building the world’s best AI-powered internal tool, we’re in the wrong business. We should let the specialists handle the “commodity” software so we can focus our energy on what makes Auto Trader unique [00:32:32].

My Advice for Embarking on a CX Transformation

  1. Understand the History: Don’t just displace legacy systems. Understand why they were built. Treat the past with “tenderness” as you move toward the future [00:29:11].
  2. The Best Product is No Product: Sometimes, the solution isn’t a new button; it’s a change in policy or a better service design upstream.
  3. Remove the “Rubbish”: The true goal is to make work more fulfilling by removing the administrative friction that makes people want to throw salt over their shoulders just to get an app to work [00:26:05].

Want to dive deeper into service design and internal product strategy? Watch the full episode: Building products for your colleagues | EP 82.