Our 'Data Team as a Service' delivered a complete rebuild of core revenue & retention reporting using dbt

In 2021, CarGurus, an online automotive marketplace, was undergoing a major transformation. They were shifting from being predominantly an automotive listing marketplace to offering end-to-end services for both dealers and consumers. This change was their top strategic priority, as CEO Jason Trevisan said in their Q2 earnings report:  

The benefits were obvious: 

• Providing an end-to-end service creates new products never before possible in the market
• Broadened product offering creates marketing leverage and opportunity to establish a much broader and stickier brand position

The challenge:

Achieving this strategy required completely new business foundations. In order to hit their goals, CarGurus needed to stand up new instances of their CRM (Salesforce) and subscription management system (Zuora) completely from scratch.

While standing up new systems is a challenge in itself, CarGurus had to overcome an additional obstacle before they could even get started.  CarGurus’ entire reporting infrastructure was based on their existing implementations of Salesforce and Zuora. Unless they completely rebuilt their data structures and product hierarchy, all their reporting on revenue and churn would have broken down overnight. 

With limited resources, and without the original analysts who had built the old models, CarGurus needed a partner who could deliver a complete rebuild of their systems in a timely and efficient manner. CarGurus leveraged Mammoth Growth’s Data Team as a Service to rebuild their revenue & retention reporting, which was critical to the success of their transformation.

Our solution: 

Mammoth Growth's Data Team as a Service worked closely with CarGurus to rebuild their revenue & retention reporting from scratch. We leveraged Snowflake, dbt labs, and our own process methodology to construct an efficient, flexible, and highly scalable data architecture to support them through the next stage of their growth and beyond. 

Mammoth Growth’s methodology is focused on quickly delivering  business value, by prioritizing project initiatives  based on critical business needs. Centralizing core pieces of business logic then results in technical dividends for related project needs. This way, tested and documented models can be used in other areas of the business, reducing analyst load in the Financial Planning & Analytics team as well as other areas in the company. 

Impact:

• We delivered for launch - Mammoth Growth delivered a complete rebuild of CarGurus' monthly recurring revenue & retention reporting. This allowed them to continue their business critical transformation without disruption to their reporting infrastructure. 
• We unlocked new insights - Our approach not only centralized the core business logic so that all teams had a reliable source of truth, but also created a number of new views and tables that didn’t exist in CarGurus’ old models. These new dashboards unlocked fresh insights and replaced complex, time-intensive lookback queries that had pulled analysts away from more valuable work prior to our implementation.
• We reduced key person risk - Mammoth Growth centralized business logic with clear documentation and testing. By the end of the project, CarGurus’ entire Analytics Engineering team was well-versed in the new model documentation and knew how each of the elements worked.
• We built in flexibility to account for further growth - In a period of rapid transformation, the models needed to stand the test of time. We designed these new models so that CarGurus could easily accommodate future changes as they advanced along their growth trajectory.

Mammoth Growth's Data Team as a Service successfully rebuilt CarGurus' revenue and retention reporting, providing a robust and scalable infrastructure to support their strategic transformation. Mammoth Growth’s focus on efficiency and scalability not only met CarGurus’ immediate operational requirements, it primed their teams for further expansion. Our partnership gave CarGurus technical expertise and  provided a solid foundation for their future growth.