Driving Growth With Confidence

Nihar Shah relies on lessons learned in MMM as he works on Carvana’s mission to become the largest and most profitable car retailer in the country.

Online auto retailer Carvana paid more than $2 billion to acquire ADESA, one of the largest wholesale auto auctions in the country. Nihar Shah and his team were then tasked with driving operational efficiency and growth for ADESA.

A year later, he and the team are doing just that.

Shah is the senior director for marketplaces marketing and operations strategy at Carvana, the company known for its massive glass-encased car vending machines. The company was founded in 2012. Shah's worked there since 2018.

He was promoted from senior director of quantitative marketing to his current role in July 2023 and tasked with driving growth at ADESA after it was purchased by Carvana for $2.2 billion.

It was the largest acquisition to date for Carvana.

To succeed in his role, Shah relies on lessons learned in Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program — a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management.

“There have been countless times in which I have had to make large-scale decisions for Carvana without perfect information,” Shah said. “MMM gave me the confidence to come up with a hypothesis and do enough diligence to believe in that hypothesis to make a decision and not be afraid of failing.”

That confidence is a necessity in his current position.

“MMM teaches you rapid prototyping and how to fail fast and pivot,” he said. “The combination of the two gave me the confidence to make decisions without perfect information. Nothing goes 100 percent to plan, but you can’t learn and pivot without making decisions.”

Shah is in a position to make those decisions for Carvana partly because of a decision he made 10 years ago to leave his finance manager job at Groupon to join the MMM program. There were two primary factors that influenced his choice.

Shah wanted to learn the intricacies of design thinking and how to use it to create greater demand. He also was drawn to the MMM program's smaller cohort size.

“Culturally, I felt like I got much closer with my MMM class than I would have if I was in another program,” he said. “The relationships I built are a massive part of the value that getting a MMM degree brings.”

Armed with knowledge from the MMM program, Shah rose through the ranks at Carvana, where he started as associate director of quantitative marketing. Today, his sights are set on helping Carvana achieve its mission to become the nation’s largest and most profitable automotive retailer.

“I’m lucky enough to be on the leadership team helping to make this massive undertaking a reality,” he said. “We are currently the fastest-growing and most profitable automotive retailer, and I’m pumped to help scale to become the largest and most profitable automotive retailer, changing the way people buy and sell cars.”

The ADESA acquisition is a huge piece of that puzzle, Shah said. One of his goals is to continue to integrate Carvana and ADESA operations and technology by unifying the 56 ADESA locations across the country in the years to come.

“A fully integrated Carvana-ADESA will bring cars closer to customers, resulting in shorter delivery times, higher conversion rates, and lower operating costs,” he said. “There are big opportunities to standardize operational processes for greater consistency.”