Edmunds
Edmunds Mission, Purpose & Impact
Frequently Asked Questions
Driven by our mission to guide consumers to their perfect car and make car buying and selling easy, Edmunds empowers car shoppers and employees alike through transparent tools and open communication.
- Empowering Car Shoppers: We provide consumers with expert vehicle reviews, real-time market data, accurate appraisal estimates, and unbiased vehicle rankings to make car shopping confident and seamless.
- Executive Transparency: Edmunds President, Seth Berkowitz leads with open communication, regularly sharing strategic updates, business milestones, and financial results across the entire organization.
- Dealership Field Insights: Our Account Executives work closely with internal dealer operations teams to share insights from the field, ensuring dealership perspectives actively inform our product updates.
- Transparent Marketplace Standards: We maintain consumer trust by delivering accurate pricing data and objective car rankings, ensuring our marketplace remains transparent and reliable.
At Edmunds, we extend our core value of Togetherness beyond our company walls through employee-led charitable giving, volunteer time off, and national non-profit alliances.
- Donation Matching: We match employee financial donations to non-profit causes and charities that are personally important to our team members.
- Paid Social Impact PTO: We provide every employee with two dedicated days of paid time off each year to volunteer for causes in their local communities.
- In Person & Virtual Philanthropy: We partner with national non-profit organizations alongside flexible virtual volunteer initiatives, such as participating in company-wide walks to support the Associate Disaster Relief Fund, hosting a book donation drive for the Boys & Girls Club of Los Angeles, and building care packages for veterans on Veterans Day.
- Employee Resource Group: Our Employee Resource Groups partner with local non-profits, such as the LA LGBT Center and the LA Ronald McDonald House, to host meaningful volunteer events.
Edmunds Employee Perspectives
Tell me more about your role in building this appraisal tool.
I’m primarily in charge of the back-end development for the tools. My team incorporates APIs that are provided by CarMax and other partners into our systems. This way, the website and the product that we’re building can use those APIs to gather user information, and use it to obtain instant offers from CarMax on behalf of our customers.
What has collaboration looked like on this project?
Each of us heavily collaborated. The project kicked off just before the pandemic, so the majority of the time we’ve been fully remote. Prior to the pandemic, Edmunds was remote-friendly. We were accustomed to Zoom calls and collaborating online and offline. We relied on Google Docs, Slack and Jira. There were several developers working on this project, some of them offshore in Belarus. We balanced the challenge of collaborating with different time zones.
Edmunds has a very open and collaborative culture. All opinions are welcome. Different opinions and feedback make our product more functional, robust and maintainable.
Have any of you used this appraisal tool in your personal life?
I used the tool in the early phase of the product when I tried to sell my brother’s car in July 2020. The car was very new, a 2020 Toyota Camry. At the time, our appraisal tool couldn’t provide an offer for very new cars. But that has since changed! We can now make instant offers on cars up to 2021 model years.
"Before we launched this instant offer appraisal program, the only way to get an appraisal from CarMax was to drive your car to a CarMax dealership and have somebody conduct a thorough inspection of your vehicle. Our solution streamlines the process and makes it convenient for consumers to get an appraisal wherever they are. Give it a try and go online. It will take you minutes to get a firm, real offer on your car - an offer that CarMax will honor as long as the information that you provide is accurate."
Tell me more about your role in building this appraisal tool.
Michelle Reuven and I work closely together. We were the original hands-on product managers defining the user experience. We define the features that we want to build and test. A lot of the work is having empathy for the user and understanding their pain points. Then, it’s building a hypothesis and testing and iterating on the site to improve the user experience. We work very closely with our design team to design that user experience, and then work closely with the development team to build and launch these iterations.
What’s an exciting project you’re working on right now?
We’re working on a new product that will give our customers the ability to track their car’s value over time. We’ve launched a minimum viable product (MVP) that’s going out to a limited audience. Using this tool, you can enter your car information to see how the value changes each month, and use that information to decide whether it’s the right time to buy or sell. This idea is in its infancy, but it’s something that we’re really excited about.
