Delivering great customer experience begins with building great technology. That was the message from TrueCar CTO Tommy McClung, who recently oversaw a total overhaul of the company’s technology platform. Speaking as part of the Developing Breakthrough Customer Experience track at the recent FutureStack 2016 conference in San Francisco, Tommy told the audience that being prepared to start from scratch can be essential to success.
A digital automotive marketplace offering “Ultimate Price Transparency,” TrueCar first started its engines back in 2005. Because it doesn’t depend on ad revenue, the site is much cleaner and easier to use than many of its competitors. Recent explosive growth means that the company now facilitates the sale of more than 17 million new cars every year, which translates into $550 billion in transactions. Add another $330 billion generated by 35 million used car sales, and it’s clear that TrueCar is doing something right.
But, Tommy said, with that growth came the fear that the platform would eventually hit a wall. In 2015, those fears became a reality.
Starting from the bottom of the stack
Tommy began his career as a software engineer, but moved into tech sales when he realized he wanted to be closer to customers. This makes him an untraditional CTO, he said, “one with a keen appreciation for building the experience through tech.” That appreciation enables him to focus on making something people want.
When TrueCar hit a transaction wall in 2015, causing car-buyers and dealers alike to suffer, Tommy recognized that it was time to step back and start over. Messy legacy systems were hamstrung by too many stacks, interdependencies, developers siloed around different code bases, and a lack of resource fluidity. Worse, there was no performance monitoring in place, and a lack of quality control that fed into a cumbersome release schedule.
Tommy’s plan was clear: full commitment to “solving UX from the bottom of the stack.” With the whole team focused on building a solid new platform, development of new products was put on indefinite hold.
Introducing Capsela
Project Capsela (named after a cool 80s toy) began with migrating all of TrueCar’s apps and infrastructure to AWS, and by creating ephemeral dev environments named “Spacepods.” Then, everything was rewritten from the ground up using a modern, modular approach, with a common code base, a style guide, and a unified stack.
Next came the implementation of full-scale monitoring and alerting. New Relic was integral to this part of the process, with New Relic Browser offering visibility into changes in React performance and New Relic Insights providing the foundation for a key element in Tommy’s plan: “dashboards everywhere.”
Finally, Tommy’s dreams of continuous deployment became a reality thanks to a new regime of automated testing. Here, New Relic Synthetics is key. And for its feature flagging and A/B testing capabilities, Tommy also gave a shout out to Launch Darkly.
Ready for relaunch
After 10 months of work on Capsela, Tommy and his team rebuilt the car-buying platform. They also overhauled TrueCar.com, which by this point was seeing more than 7 million unique monthly visits. Finally, on September 15, 2016, the new and improved TrueCar was ready for ignition.
Day one, unsurprisingly, brought a number of what Tommy called “Oh sh*t!” moments. Thankfully, New Relic was on hand to diagnose each and every problem, from plummeting Apdex scores to skyrocketing throughput, from lagging queries to frontend JavaScript errors.
With those teething problems taken care of, Tommy was pleased to report better performance, better UX, and better SEO than ever before.
Transformation takeaways
So what teachable lessons did Tommy and his team learn over the past year?
- Know your core competency.
- Build your systems to enable fast iteration.
- Simplify, instrument, and monitor everything.
- Never forget: making what people want starts with a platform that enables it.
To learn more about TrueCar’s transformation, be sure to watch Tommy’s full FutureStack presentation in the video below: