About me
I’m Pete Roome – a founder, CTO, and product leader based in London.
I spent the first twelve years of my career as a software engineer, building things. Then I spent eight years in product, figuring out what to build. Now I’m back building again – this time as CTO and co-founder of Carpata.
What I’m building
Carpata makes AI-native tools for automotive parts procurement. We help garages, fleets, and dealers find and order the right parts for any vehicle, first time.
That sounds simple. It isn’t. The automotive aftermarket has a 20% return rate on parts – not because people are indecisive, but because the underlying data is broken. The industry runs on decades of messy catalogues, fragmented supplier systems, and a supply chain that hasn’t been meaningfully digitised. We’re building the intelligence layer that makes sense of all of it.
Background
Before Carpata I was Head of Product at Cazoo, leading product development across up to eight teams. I joined as Lead Product Manager, shipped car subscriptions, led international expansion, and delivered a full pivot from end-to-end dealer to marketplace during significant restructuring.
Before that I was Product Lead at Vinterior (vintage furniture marketplace) and Product Manager at Wonderbly (personalised children’s books). At Wonderbly I started on the engineering side – I designed their CRM infrastructure and grew email marketing from zero to £2m revenue before moving into product.
I started my career at Kyan, a digital agency where I learned to build things properly – and had a lot of fun doing it.
Starting from scratch
I keep coming back to zero-to-one building. I co-founded Sisu, which turned your exercise data into art. At Upstate, a startup studio, we built and launched Pingle (Tinder for groups) and Akin (a people search engine). Carpata is the same instinct applied to a bigger problem – find something broken, build something real, learn fast.
One thing that’s changed this time round is how I’m building. After years away from code, AI tools have put me back in the editor – not as the engineer I was a decade ago, but as something new. It’s the most tangible example I have of what it means to build products with AI, not just about AI, and it’s shaping how I think about everything we’re doing at Carpata.
What I write about
This blog is where I think out loud about what I’m learning. The topics that keep coming back:
- Product thinking – how to figure out what to build, how to validate it, and how to know when you’re wrong.
- AI-native product development – what’s different about the product process when your product’s behaviour is probabilistic. Not the hype, but the practical reality: what happens when your system is 80% accurate and you need to design around the other 20%.
- Startup engineering – the trade-offs, shortcuts, and decisions that come with building technology in a small team with limited time and money.
Outside work
Before children, I was an endurance sports enthusiast – I cycled London to Barcelona, London to Paris in under 24 hours, and ran a 10k inside the Arctic Circle. Now I have two young kids who are teaching me more about patience and prioritisation than any management course ever did.