Current Position: Director of Product Management, CarGurus
Current Location: Cambridge, MA
Describe your role at CarGurus.
CarGurus is an automotive search engine, helping buyers (consumers) find great deals from top-rated dealers. I focus on optimizing and launching new products for the dealership side of the business, working closely with each department across the entire company including sales, customer success, engineering and marketing. I lead a team of product managers and we all collaborate with engineering to prioritize ideas, develop those ideas into new features and products, test those with customers, then communicate these new enhancements to the sales team, and track performance after each roll-out.
What’s your favorite part of working at CarGurus?
The growth and fast-paced nature of everything we do here. I joined just about 2 years ago and was employee #150 — I believe we just hired our 450th employee. The growth has been pretty wild, and it’s been really exciting watching us take the US market by storm, launch additional products, and gain a real foothold in a couple of international markets. At the same time, we’ve done a pretty solid job of maintaining the startup vibe here. We move very quickly, are constantly testing new ideas/features, and we’re certainly not showing any signs of slowing down.
What attracted you to this opportunity?
It was actually two separate HBS connections that brought me to CarGurus. When I graduated from HBS in 2012, Sheryl Sandberg was our speaker and I vividly remember her advice to us: "find a rocket ship and hop aboard." That stuck with me. And then a few years later, my HBS section mate Ashley Karr joined CarGurus and a few months into the job was loving it. She suggested I come check it out and as I started learning more about the company, the leadership team, and the potential for growth, I pretty quickly realized this was exactly where I wanted to be.
What are you most proud of when it comes to your work at CarGurus?
When I joined the company in 2015, there was no Product Management at CarGurus. I was originally hired to work in Business Development (partnerships) but a year into the job was asked to shift over and help us launch a Product Management function. What started as a team of one has now grown to a team of 5 and we’re actively hiring to really make Product Management a critical part of what we do here. Helping to prove the need for this new function and then grow the team over the past year is something I’m definitely proud of and I look forward to watching the team grow even more in the coming months!
