Meet Carolyn Ong, the powerhouse behind product at Karmo APAC. She leads the team building the product function behind one of Australia’s fastest-growing car subscription platforms, and she got there through Technology Consulting, HSBC, Flight Centre and RACQ, across insurance, travel and now cars. Through every one of those moves, the first thing she reaches for has been the same: the right question. Read on for Carolyn’s candid take on what it actually takes to build a product function from scratch, how she has seen women show up differently in male-dominated rooms over the course of her career, and why she believes the industry needs to stop screening for experience it doesn’t need.
Carolyn, how would you describe what you do to someone who has never heard of product management or car subscriptions before?
Picture a group of people who want to go somewhere, nobody agrees where, and there’s a limited tank of petrol or battery. A product manager gets the lucky job of working out which trip is actually worth taking, why this group would want to go, and what gets left behind so the petrol or charge lasts. That PM doesn’t drive and they don’t build the engine. They steer the decision towards the destination and keep everyone honest about whether the car is heading towards it.
In everyday terms, every app or service you use exists because someone has to decide what it should do, who it’s for, which problem it fixes, and why it’s worth doing. My days go on talking to the people who use our product, watching where they get stuck or give up, and working out which frustration out of all those that exist, gives us the best return in customer experience and business value. Then I work with designers and engineers to make it real, and afterwards I check whether life actually got better. Rinse and repeat, many problems and opportunities at once.
And honestly, I love it. I love it because the reward is invisible. When you get it right, nobody notices the product at all, it just works. And when you get it wrong, they tell you, which is its own kind of gift. Customers only bother telling you when they still want you to get it right.
Now, the thing that I do all of that for is car subscription, which is new enough that plenty of people still haven’t come across it. It exists because owning a car asks a lot of you. A big commitment up front, years of it, and everything that comes after. Subscription opens that up with a regular payment, the car you want in your driveway, and all the administrative side of owning a car already included.
The part that really makes this model work is that you can change your mind. Your life changes, so the car changes with it. New baby, new job, moving cities, you’re not stuck with a big decision you had to go through hoops to even get made. Just a newer car, more suited to the life you’re actually living.
So it’s all the good parts of having a car, without the weight of owning one, and all the excitement and flexibility of getting a new one every few months. And it puts a car within reach of people for whom the commitment is just one more thing they don’t need to stress about.
What was your first job and what did it teach you that still sticks with you today?
I got started in Technology Consulting after finishing my bachelor’s in Computer Science. That was a really good one to get my career started, as it required you to be good at a lot of different things across different projects and industries and businesses very quickly. It taught me how to pivot effectively, how to get up to speed fast, how to work out the right questions to ask and then actually ask them.
That last one is probably the one skill that has stuck with me the most after all these years: how to work out the right questions to ask and then actually ask them. I’ve put it to practice as a life skill, maybe even more than a work skill. You’d be surprised how quickly you can understand almost anything just by asking the right questions. Most people assume getting across a new field takes years, and a lot of the time it takes a handful of good questions and the willingness to be the person in the room who doesn’t know yet. The best question is usually the simple one everyone else is too embarrassed to ask, which is normally some version of “why do we do it that way?”
I’ve done the same thing every time I’ve changed industries since, and car subscription was no different. I knew nothing about it when I started.
Your career has taken you across several industries to Karmo. Can you talk us through that trajectory?
My first consulting role really opened up a lot of doors for me, and I’ve found myself many times in front of an opportunity that I didn’t really feel I was ready for. Moving from a big multinational consulting firm to a startup, and vice versa, were moves I’d never planned out, and to be honest, I didn’t feel ready for at the time. But you’re never really ready for anything; you just do it, and that makes you ready. I’ve never walked into a new industry knowing it. I’ve walked in knowing how to find out.
Looking back on it now, all my previous experience has been consumer-facing, and they all involve high-consideration, high-anxiety purchases. Insurance, a holiday, a car. People are nervous, there’s real money involved, and the process is usually more confusing than it needs to be. That’s the kind of problem I like, these are things that people have to get into. How do we turn it into something that’s painless, but then take it even a bit further into an enjoyable experience?
What are the most important skills, technical and human, that you need to do your job well?
Technically, you need enough depth to be in the conversation, not to do the job. I’m not writing the code, but I need to understand how the system works well enough to tell the difference between “that’s difficult” and “that’s difficult but worth it”.
The bigger technical one for me is data. Not just getting to it, although if I have to wait for someone else to pull a number for me I’m already too slow. It’s being able to look at it and work out what it’s actually telling me, are we doing the right thing, are we on the right track, or are we completely off the rails? Data drives decisions, and it’s something I’ve learned to really harness.
The human side is the one I feel most strongly about. If you’re in product management, you have to be a people person first.
Product management is building products and experiences for people, and to do that well you also need an entire village with you. Design, engineering, testing, marketing, operations, it’s a long chain and every link in it is someone else. You’re surrounded by people on both sides: the ones you’re building for and the ones you’re building with.
I’ve always believed strong products come from strong culture, and strong culture starts with the people building it. The care you have for your team is what informs the care that goes into serving your customers. I don’t think those two are separable.
None of it comes with authority, either. Product managers rarely get handed any, and nobody has to do what you say. They have to want to, which really, when it comes down to it, means they have to like you, or at the very least, respect you. The whole job runs on whether people want to come with you and whether they trust you’re taking them somewhere worth going.
What drew you to product management and where did that passion come from?
Coming from a Computer Science and consulting background where I normally worked in teams with people of different responsibilities and roles, and where I had to do multiple things including the actual coding and technical integrations, what I found early on was that I was always drawn to the “what” and the “why”. My interest was always in what we are building or designing, who are we doing this for, and why is it important. Are we solving something that actually has an impact? Are we addressing real needs? Those are a lot of questions I set out to answer myself.
At a time when product management didn’t really have a name as a discipline, I found that my best came out when it was time to craft solutions to problems and especially when that problem solving had to be creative. It was only later on as I moved industries and roles, that I found PM. That’s what drew me to it, but what has made me stay in it is the fact that it’s such a unique role wherein you are responsible and accountable for your product, but you also get to put on so many different hats in the execution of your role.
Car subscription is still a relatively new concept for most Australians. What do you think is the single biggest barrier to it becoming mainstream and what needs to shift?
Awareness, most Australians simply haven’t come across it yet.
We’re a disruptor in a market that’s been doing the same things for a very long time. There’s buying, financing, leasing and renting. That’s been the menu for decades, and everyone knows how each one works, where the catch is, and what to ask. Subscription is new, and it borrows pieces from a few different concepts at once, not even necessarily in automotive, but just the concept of subscription services in general. At the moment, as a new concept, because it doesn’t slot neatly into a box people already have, it takes a moment for the idea to really take hold for consumers.
And I think that’s both the biggest competition and the largest opportunity we have, not really the operators in the automotive market, but we’re competing against the idea people already carry about how you’re supposed to get a car.
And that’s the exciting piece of this puzzle, being in this stage of growth in a scaling industry, how do we build familiarity? Every new category or disruptor or mode goes the same way. It stays a bit confusing until enough people are doing it that you hear about it from someone you actually know. Once your mate has one and can tell you what it’s really like, the concept explains itself, and the questions turn practical instead of sceptical. We’re not far off that, we’re making huge headway and I for one am really happy to be in the thick of where we can really take car subscriptions in Australia.
What has been a pivotal moment or project in your career?
Stepping into Head of Product at Karmo, from being a product manager.
Karmo is at a genuinely pivotal point in its growth: a scale-up moving quickly, a proprietary platform being built in-house, and a portfolio running customer experience, fleet, payments, dealer platforms and enterprise all at once. Moving into HoP, I was being handed responsibility for how all of that gets done, and I was building the team at the same time.
That changed what I thought my job was. I stopped thinking of myself as the person who delivers the product and started thinking of myself as the person who builds the system, the process, the team that delivers products, and delivers it well. How decisions get made, how we choose what’s worth doing, how a product manager knows what good looks like. Karmo had a product team, and what it needed was a real product function. The gap between those two is where a lot of scale-ups stall. It’s much less glamorous than shipping, and it outlasts anything I ship personally.
Which cuts both ways, and that’s what made me reassess how I work. As a product manager, if you get something wrong, you ship the wrong thing, and then you fix it. When you’re building the system everyone else works inside, your mistakes get inherited too. A bad call becomes somebody’s default for years. The reach is much greater from this seat, in both directions, and I spend most of my attention on having all the right data to make the good call. Knowing how far a bad one travels is what changes how carefully you think.
It’s pivotal in a wider sense as well. The role sits across the team, the culture, an industry that hasn’t traditionally had much of this discipline, and a business that’s genuinely unusual in Australia with a lot of room still ahead of it. And when I think about the potential impact I can make from this seat, and how much closer I am to making a real difference to real people, that’s what has changed most in the way I think about my work and how I go about it.
You have worked across some very male-dominated industries. What have you seen shift over that time for women in these industries?
Personally, in all the places where I’ve worked, women have been in the room for a while now, including in leadership. The biggest change that I can see now is how they occupy it.
Early on, what I noticed was that while there were women in the room, or in these positions, most were almost apologetic about being there or going out of their way to justify why they were. I don’t think that was them; I think it was a product of the rooms and the environment they had to operate in. You justified the seat before you were allowed to use it, and imposter syndrome was something I saw more in women than men. Now that’s shifting, with more women now walking in knowing they’ve earned the right to be there.
That shift, I think, is the product of the advocacy and empowerment of women that came before us. There are so many more women-focused groups, networks, and organisations now, run by these women who have been in those early rooms, and they’ve created spaces to speak to those insecurities directly rather than politely around them. They’re preparing and mentoring women with both the skills and the confidence to assert themselves.
I think I am a beneficiary of what these women have done, and I don’t take that for granted. I’ve had no qualms walking into traditionally male-dominated industries, and I know that’s partly because other women made those rooms easier to walk into than the ones they entered themselves. There is a whole community of amazing women who have done the hard yards, have thrived despite it, and are now paying it forward. And that’s the part I want to consciously contribute to, continuing to pay it forward. For me, it happens in the day to day rather than in anything formal. I coach my team by asking questions rather than handing over answers, and by commenting on their work rather than rewriting it, because the job is to build someone’s thinking, not to do their thinking for them. When someone is still working out whether she’s allowed to take up the space, that’s worth more than anything you could tell her. And it applies at any age, not just to women starting out.
I’d be careful about calling it done, though, because it’s still a long way from finished. The shift has moved faster in the technology and corporate side of automotive than in the parts of the industry closest to the vehicle itself. And there’s a difference between women being in the building and women being in the roles where the decisions get made. The first has improved a lot. The second is still catching up.
Karmo is proud to have a workforce that is 40 percent women, significantly higher than the industry average. What do you think Karmo does differently?
Karmo sits in a well-worn industry, and the key differentiator, even when I compare it to other places I’ve been, is that it’s full of people willing to think past the boundaries of what they know and what they’re used to. We have people with decades of experience in this industry, and here they are working out the next phase of mobility and transport rather than defending the way it’s always been done. That’s not a common combination. Long experience usually arrives with firm opinions about what’s possible.
The other part is the mix, recognising that you need to look outside the same pool of industry experts. Different backgrounds, different industries, different expertise.
And really, it’s those two factors, the openness to go outside boundaries and tradition and the willingness to bring in discipline experts, that mean there’s a much wider pool of talent to dip into.
If I connect that to the 40 percent, it’s this. Most of the women in our head office didn’t come from automotive backgrounds. It’s a real mix, and it’s the result of having leaders who think outside boundaries and tradition, and who genuinely value people that can think past their own experience. Once you stop screening for whoever has done exactly this before, the pool opens up on its own. I don’t think we got to 40 percent by being noble about it. We got there by wanting a particular kind of thinking more than we wanted a particular CV.
What is one thing the automotive industry could do right now to attract and retain more women in technical and leadership roles?
Stop looking for automotive industry experience in roles that don’t critically need it.
It’s the most effective filter this industry has for keeping itself exactly as it is, and I don’t think anyone wants to remain stagnant. Every time that line goes into a job ad you narrow the pool to people already in the industry, which gets you more of who you already have.
What you actually want is balance in the ecosystem. You need the deep experts, the people who genuinely know vehicles and operations and how this business runs. But you also need experts in the supporting fields, product, design, analytics, marketing. Those are transferable crafts, and they work best sitting alongside the deep expertise rather than instead of it. That’s how I got up to speed here. I leaned on the people who already knew it, and in turn I brought in the experience I have in designing and building software, and I think that’s a genuine advantage to keeping the industry dynamic and evolving and moving forward.
If you want more women in technical and leadership roles tomorrow rather than in a decade, that’s the easiest move available, almost a no-brainer. It costs nothing except a conversation with whoever decides your role requirements.
What would you say to a young woman who is interested in product management but has never considered automotive as the place to pursue it?
To any aspiring PM, I’d start by saying stop looking at automotive as a male industry. It’s been around forever and widely considered “male”, but so have others like finance and banking and nobody really tells a young woman not to consider those. They’re all industries that need good thinkers and good operators, people who can work in the now and think about what’s next.
And like every industry that’s been around forever, the exciting part is being there for the next wave of it. The next big disruption. Automotive is in one right now, and product management is a seriously good seat to be in the thick of that.
The barrier is also lower than it looks. Nobody in this industry expects a product person to have come from automotive, because there aren’t enough of us to be precious about it.
And it opened doors I didn’t expect. Because of how complex the industry is, again, because of it having been around forever, as someone in product, I’ve ended up working across legal, compliance, commercials, and operations in a way I don’t think I would have at a pure software company. That breadth is unusual, and it makes you the kind of product manager who can walk into almost anything.
What is the best piece of advice you have ever received and who gave it to you?
My first ever team leader, who was a strong female role model for me, gave me the best piece of advice that I still very much live and breathe: remember the human behind the work.
It cuts both ways. Every request that I get comes from a person with a reason behind it, and what they’ve asked for is very often not what they actually need. And everything you’re looking at, the ticket, the code, the process that’s driving you mad, was made by someone who had a reason for doing it that way too. You might not agree with the reason once you find it. There’s always one.
So my job is to understand the why, and the most useful skill I’ve got is being able to ask why, and to ask it in a way that gets an honest answer rather than a defensive one, and always, always remember that you are speaking to a human.
Do that and you stop arguing with the decision and start dealing with the reason underneath it. It’s also why I’ve never thought of product management as a technical job. It’s a job about people who happen to be building software.