Empowering automotive retail: How mobile.de creates empowered teams and loyal customers.

Our team focuses on developing and maintaining services for car dealers, specialising in campaign management solutions that help dealers advertise their inventory across platforms such as Google, Meta, and Kleinanzeigen.
We have been working on the mobile.de project for about two to two and a half years. However, our collaboration actually began 5 years ago, when mobile.de was still part of ebay classifieds.

As a team we work in a mixed mode with internal mobile.de employees who fulfil the roles of architect, data analyst, business manager, PM lead, UX, QA, Sales and Agile Coaches. From our side we contribute to the team with the following roles: A Team Lead, a Tech Team Lead, two Backend Developers, two Frontend Developers, and a Product Manager.
The team’s size and structure have remained consistent over the years, which has contributed to our stability and efficiency.

Over the last year we had two primary challenges to tackle:

 

1. 1. Maintain high-quality code and address technical debt proactively

    
   Following the transfer of the ebay Classifieds Business to Adevinta in 2021, which included mobile.de, the company underwent a broader reorganisation of its product teams. During this process, it became evident that the services needed to be redistributed among the teams to ensure equal distribution of workload and ownership of meaningful subdomains. As a result of this restructuring, we took ownership of the Marketing subdomain. It became our responsibility to maintain a high level of quality of the inherited services, and to take care of the legacy code. As is often the case with legacy systems, regular rewrites using modern technologies were essential to maintain performance, improve maintainability, and leverage state-of-the-art technology.
    

2. 2. Enhance the value proposition for dealers through new features and improved services

    
   mobile.de aims to maintain high customer satisfaction and continuously enhance customer’s experience on the platform. Our mandate as a team was to find opportunities for car dealers to increase their reach and revenue.
   For instance, car dealers on mobile.de were challenged with supply exceeding demand. To address this, mobile.de began offering services to advertise vehicles on external platforms such as Facebook, utilizing Facebook’s performance marketing APIs. Our team was tasked not only with taking ownership of these campaign management solutions from other teams but also improving and evolving these services for future use.
   

The overall mission has always been to provide a seamless and efficient platform for dealers and customers to buy and sell used vehicles. This lead to:
 

Goal one: Handover services

 
The first step towards achieving this goal was to redistribute service responsibilities evenly across teams. For our team, that meant inheriting several services from other teams: we took over and maintained marketing product services like Facebook, Google Performance Max and Kleinanzeigen ad publishing. At the same time, we handed over services to new teams, such as the Market Comparison service. The slicing of the services followed a set of rules:
 

• A product or service should not be split (keeping the bounded context)
• The team’s skill set should align with the challenges the service adheres
• Services with a high intellectual property factor should be handled by internal teams to reduce the risk of knowledge drain.

 
The handover phase was a perfect motivator to update or start a proper documentation of services and fostered knowledge exchange between the teams. The redistribution of service responsibilities across various teams resulted in a more balanced workload. This freed up capacity, which was then strategically utilized to rewrite and modernize legacy code, that was beneficial for our second goal.
 

Goal two: Service rewrite and technical debt

 
Mobile.de was fostering the rewrite via the implementation of a “Tech Excellence Program”, which required teams to dedicate 30% of each quarter to addressing technical debt. Additionally, a Tech Innovation Program was established to promote continuous improvement through regular tech guild exchanges and a commitment to exploring new technologies and approaches.
 
The services of the car dealers’ cluster were prioritized and new technologies were used to rewrite and replace legacy services. Key improvements included the use of Hotjar heatmaps and Optimizely for feature flags, the introduction of Kafka to replace RabbitMQ, adoption of Single read/write principle, implementation of MongoDB for distributed locking, and the use of canary testing for deployments.
 

Goal three: Increase the value for car dealers

 
To enhance the process of car selling and provide value to dealers, our team collaborated closely with mobile.de colleagues on product discovery, user interviews and early stage testing, to identify services that bring real value to users. This approach ensured that only the features most likely to be adopted by users are released. During the discovery we found that the dealers’ satisfaction increased when we provided more data insights, competitive information, and pricing transparency. For instance, we worked on the “Market Comparison” (“Price Radar” ) feature, which enables car dealers to compare prices across platforms.
 
The campaign management solutions were successfully taken over by our team. This was mainly a technical task for the ProductDock team, as we published and updated ads across Facebook, Kleinanzeigen, and Google Performance Max using Kafka topics. On the business side, the mobile.de sales team has enhanced services by advising car dealers and providing operational support on how to effectively allocate their monthly marketing budget. This assistance has resulted in increased impressions and revenue for the dealers.

Our Tech Stack included: Kafka, Spring Boot, Grafana, MySQL (for legacy services), MongoDB (for new services), Kubernetes, Optimizely, React, Next.js, GCP, and AWS.
 
To preserve Quality Assurance the team emphasizes clean code, data-driven product development, A/B testing, and regular code reviews to maintain high quality.
 
Regular sync meetings with the team, including the main stakeholders, ensure that everyone is aware of the status, deadlines, and responsibilities. Tech guild exchanges and meetings between technical leads keep the team updated on new trends, deprecated services, and priorities, e.g. during the allocated technical debt time budget.
 
Using OKRs as an alignment tool provides a comprehensive view of team objectives and gives them directions. The whole team is involved by providing feedback on what objectives and key results are achievable from a tech perspective. Following the iterative OKR process makes it easy to keep everyone up-to-date in terms of how qualitative or quantitative goals evolve. Being involved in these processes fosters a sense of confidence, purpose, and impact in our work.

• We have successfully rewritten the legacy services, and improved performance and maintainability.
• Service responsibilities were distributed more evenly, keeping boundaries of products, preserving IP of mobile, and taking the capabilities into account so that teams can work independently.
• Customer satisfaction: We identified and worked on new opportunities for dealers, such as budget and timeframe extensions regarding the performance ads. We also added leasing options that dealers can now offer to their car dealers. As a team, we played a crucial role in improving the user satisfaction, particularly with the service of the “Market Comparison” (price radar) that dealers loved to use.
• The number of users and revenue increased by enhancing the services for Google/ Facebook/ Kleinanzeigen campaigns.
• Win-win for client and ProductDock: mobile.de fosters collaboration, enabling our team to quickly move from norming to performing. In addition to improving technical skills, our team is always aiming for a seamless cross-team collaboration – benefiting both the client and ProductDock. Even as an external team, other groups like to work with us, ask for advice and request support. On the ProductDock side, we also successfully mentored a group of Rookies in our Rookie boot camp (a program to find and hire new talents), which was only possible because the team is in strong synergy.

• Regularly discontinuing unused products helps maintain focus and prevent feature creep.
• A dedicated budget for technical debt is motivating for proactively managing technical debt.
• Regular tech guild exchanges and meetings between technical leads improve quality and knowledge sharing.
• Stable teams lead to stable performance.
• Clear communication and alignment among teams are essential to avoid confusion and delays.
• OKRs are a great tool to give teams direction, it is especially motivating since it makes transparent how the team contributes to user satisfaction and company goals.
• Owning important services internally provides better control and facilitates knowledge sharing.
• Data-driven decisions and A/B testing are vital for measuring the impact of changes.
• Addressing dealer complaints and understanding their needs is crucial for improving the platform.