Jon McNeill had a mandate: fix Tesla’s online sales.
When he joined as president in November 2015, the automaker was trying to sell six-figure vehicles like the Model S and Model X online — something few consumers were interested in.
“We gotta figure out how to sell cars online,” McNeill said during an interview on the “My First Million” podcast, which was released on Thursday. “Nobody was buying $120,000 things sight-unseen online.”
McNeill said his experience at Tesla — including his goal to increase online sales — shaped three key leadership lessons: set ambitious goals, prioritize talent, and uncover problems by actually using your product. He’s since served as COO at Lyft and as a board member at General Motors and Lululemon.
As he dug into Tesla’s online website, he and CEO Elon Musk spotted a core problem.
It took 64 clicks to purchase a car. So he said Musk made Domino’s Pizza their new benchmark.
“Every click you ask the consumer to make, your conversion goes down,” McNeill said in an episode released on Thursday. “Turns out, it takes 10 thumb taps to buy a Domino’s pizza at that time. He’s like, ‘We’re 64, Domino’s is 10. Let’s go to 10.'”
Tesla has since streamlined its online checkout beyond that initial goal. Business Insider counted that it takes about five clicks to buy a new Model 3 on the company’s website.
The rise of one-touch payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay has also helped speed up online purchases.
For McNeill, the website’s improvements represent a broader philosophy that he says helped transform Tesla into America’s dominant EV seller.
Instead of targeting incremental improvements on its weaknesses, Tesla’s goal is “order of magnitude” enhancements.
“If you set a goal for 5 to 7% improvement, you’re probably going to get 3 to 5%,” he told the podcast. “Part of Elon’s secret sauce is he sets the order of magnitude improvement goals — 10x, 100x — and it forces you to think way differently about how you solve a problem.”
Those kinds of problems, he added, are often invisible unless leaders engage directly with their own products. McNeill and Musk only spotted the issue because they were using Tesla’s website.
He also emphasized that hiring the right people is critical to spotting and solving issues.
“In fact, 60% of my calendar was interviews,” he told the podcast. “You totally win and lose on talent.”
To identify top candidates, McNeill said leaders should focus less on résumés and more on how candidates think. He said he would frequently ask applicants about how they would approach his own work problems — an approach he said gave Tesla a pipeline of curious workers.
“That’s the knack of Tesla. It’s like ‘let’s turn complex into simple,'” he said. “They have the ability within a minute or two to take a really complex question and boil it down to principle.”
