Service Lane · Leadership

Four products,
one service lane.

I led the architecture and got every team onto the same picture, without designing the screens myself.

Role Lead Product DesignerPartner Director of ConsumerScope Four product areas

Problem

Dealers waited on a VCI before listing an acquired vehicle, and four products had to support a faster way.

What I did

I led the research, built one shared picture of how a car moves through the four products, and got the teams and their leaders aligned.

Results

  • Live in a pilot with some dealerships
  • 4 product areas on one architecture
  • Dealers list without waiting on a VCI
The orange Viper inspection rig around a white sports car, with the ACV Auctions logo

01 · My role

I led the architecture work and
left the screens to each team.

My PM, the director of consumer and I were asked to work out how four product areas should fit together. My PM and I ran the research, I built the shared picture, and I got the teams and their leaders into the same conversation. Each team then designed its own part.

Inspections. A new inspection app for dealers to use on site
Consumer. The widget and the dealer portal
Retail. The dealer's inventory if they sell on the lot
Wholesale. Where the car goes if they sell it online

02 · The problem

Dealers had to wait for an inspection before they could list a car on ACV’s Marketplace.

Problem statementHow might we influence dealer acquisition decisions by leveraging continuously collected vehicle data to generate dynamic, data-informed pricing?

Dealers who acquire a vehicle had to wait for a Vehicle Condition Inspector (VCI) before listing it for auction. The new ACV Pro self-inspection feature lets them inspect on their own schedule and list faster. As they add vehicle info, the price updates, so they get a firmer offer from ClearCar's pricing engine. The app brings together the vehicle disclosure form, OBD II codes, photo capture, Viper, Virtual Lift and AMP. That information shows in the ClearCar Dealer Portal and the Max VDP, so ClearCar, ACV Pro, ACV Max and ACV Auctions all had to work together.

03 · How I led it

How I got four teams onto one picture.

Understand

1The ask

My PM, the director of consumer and I were asked to work out how the four areas fit together.

Project ScopeResearch Planning
2See how dealers work

We went to Dallas and Houston and talked to dealerships about how their service lanes run. Most of them did it differently.

Dealership interviews
Two slides from the research readout: an executive summary of the Dallas and Houston visits, and the six-step service lane process with photos from the dealerships

Personas

Who is at the service lane?

Each role owns some tasks. Some tasks are shared.

Porter

  • Driving and moving vehicles around the service area
  • Manages vehicles on the lot
  • Returns the vehicle to the customer

Service Lane Adviser

Depending on how many vehicles come in the Service Lane, they will dedicate most, if not all of their time to inputting vehicle details into the system

Used Car Manager

  • Manages appointments coming in for the day (CRM)
  • Does final appraisal for vehicle offers using their IMS
  • Presents the final vehicle offer to their customer
  • Follows up with the customer

Shared tasks

  • Puts the vehicle info into ClearCar
  • Does initial inspection of the vehicle
  • Takes photos of the vehicle
  • Greets customer and checks in vehicle when it arrives
  • Creates RO (repair order) for the vehicle

Dots show who does the task: blue Porter, pink Service Lane Adviser, gold Used Car Manager

Sample workflow

How a car moves through the lane

  1. 1Service Lane checks in vehicle that arrived in their center
  2. 2Porter pulls up ClearCar widget in their iPad to do initial appraisal (3-5 mins)
  3. 3Used Car Manager looks up vehicle info in ACV Max and does appraisal
  4. 4UCM prints out ACV Max Offer page and attaches it to the RO

Align

3Make one shared picture

I turned what we learned into a service blueprint, a flow hierarchy and personas, so every team was looking at the same thing.

4 Team CollaborationWorkshops
4Bring the teams and leaders in

I presented the Texas findings to the other designers and to the VPs of ACV Max, Consumer and Auctions, and hosted workshops so each team could see where its product fit.

Presenting to Leadership
Service lane blueprint: customer journey, front-office, back-office and support processes across the ClearCar, ACV Pro and ACV Max products

Deliver

5Hand it back

Each team mocked up designs for its own part of the service lane.

Concept UI
6Close the loop

I presented the full picture to leadership again. It is live and rolling out as a pilot.

Leadership reviewPilot live
ACV Pro app screens: a vehicle detail page, the same page with an offer, and a chat with the offer ready
Slide 1 of 5

Dealers inspect on their own

Dealers inspect the vehicle in the ACV Pro app on their own and skip the wait for a VCI.

Viper, the orange inspection hardware, next to a truck in a dealership service bay
Slide 2 of 5

Viper connects to the app

Viper is the hardware that connects to the ACV Pro app. It has rolled out in pilot programs with some dealerships.

ClearCar dealer portal vehicle page with retail and wholesale recommendation cards
Slide 3 of 5

ClearCar prices the vehicle

ClearCar is the pricing engine that helps determine how much the vehicle is worth, using information from Viper and ACV Pro.

ACV Max customer offer panel with offer history
Slide 4 of 5

ACV Max holds their retail stock

ACV Max helps our dealership partners retail their stock. It’s basically their inventory on the dealership lot.

ACV Auctions marketplace with vehicle listings and filters
Slide 5 of 5

The wholesale route

This is where dealers wholesale the vehicle at auction.

04 · The hard part

Nobody owned the overlap.

Each VP knew their own product inside out. What nobody had was a picture of where Max, Consumer and Auctions touched the same car, and what happened when one product handed it to the next. That was the real ask: map it out so everyone could see it.

So the overlap became the deliverable. The service blueprint showed every point where one product passed a car to another, and the workshops turned those points into decisions about who owned what. Getting the UX team and three VPs in one room was its own project, so when we couldn't, the work kept moving in FigJam comments and Slack updates.

05 · The results

Live, and rolling out as a pilot.

Liverolling out as a pilot with some dealerships
4 areasworking from one architecture
No VCI waitdealers list on their own schedule

What it led to. Service Lane showed I could lead four teams to one picture without designing the screens myself. My manager positioned me as the UX lead other parts of ACV could call on, and as the pilot launched, I moved to lead DigiCast on the core Auctions product.

More case studies

ClearCarHow I turned an acquired widget into a portal dealers live in.View case study →DigiCast block clerk, auctioneer and seller rep screensDigiCastBidding software for ACV's physical auction lanes.View case study →

Thanks for reading.

Head back home, or browse the rest of my work.

← Back homeAll work

Back to top ↑