Tell me about a time when you thought long-term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.
I was managing a project for a top auto manufacturer to improve customer satisfaction at each dealership location.
During the discovery phase, at one dealer location, we identified the need for the application to offer an upgrade of vehicles’ new model. The dealer was happy to pay a good amount per month for this app.
The app needed local data from the dealer for analytics. So, we had to build the app specific to the dealer. We built this app for three dealers in one month’s time, which started generating instant revenue. The project was a success. Only we have to build this app for 1500 dealers across the USA. Each dealer was ready for paying for the development and use.
Soon I realized that, though there is short-term gain, there are many long-term downsides. Maintenance of multiple versions of the app would be a nightmare.
I decided to stop the project and focus on a long-term project to build a central data hub. Data from all the dealers could be channelized to this data hub and a single version of the application can be used by all the dealers. For each dealer, we need to build connectors and adapters to get the data.
This project turned out to be a big success in the long run with huge savings for the company.