MAX + ClearCar: One Platform

In 60 seconds

• The problem: ACV had two appraisal products, MAX and ClearCar, run by separate teams. Features were built twice, bugs were fixed twice, and dealers had to learn two interfaces for the same job.
• What I did: I was the lead researcher and lead designer. I audited every feature and workflow in both products, defined exactly what was worth keeping, ran the cross-functional workshops to agree on it, designed one appraisal experience inside ACV MAX, and presented the case to executive leadership.
• The result: Leadership approved it unanimously, dealers validated the direction in usability testing, and phase one launched in June 2026. Instead of rebuilding anything, the plan brings ClearCar’s best capabilities into MAX, creating one place to appraise, price, and decide what to do with every car.

Two experiences, one dealer

ACV MAX was a dealer’s system for managing inventory and appraising cars. The ClearCar dealer portal was where leads came in from consumers and where dealers appraised those cars and talked to customers. Same dealer, same car, same job: two different tools.

Everyone assumed they served different needs, so the default was to keep both. But separate teams with separate roadmaps meant neither was built around the dealer. As one dealer put it: “Why do I have to learn two different interfaces for the same thing?”

The insight: don’t default to keeping both, and don’t rebuild either. Measure what actually overlaps, keep only what’s truly different, and build on what already works.

The audit: every feature, both products

“They look similar” wasn’t going to convince anyone. I broke both products down into their individual pieces and compared them side by side: a full feature inventory, workflow mapping, a capability-by-capability comparison, and who owned each piece and what state it was in.

The finding: 80% overlap. MAX already supported the majority of the workflows, and with more advanced tools behind them. The question stopped being “should we merge?” and became “what, exactly, is worth bringing over?”

Keep the 20% that matters

This was the most important decision in the project, so I made it explicit. I evaluated every ClearCar capability MAX didn’t have, and sorted each one into “bring it in” or “leave it behind.”

That gave the whole team a simple rule: we are not rebuilding. Protect what MAX does well, and bring over only what’s genuinely different.

Designing around the dealer’s job

With the pieces sorted, I organized the new experience around what the dealer’s appraisal team is actually trying to do: turn a customer’s car into a confident buying decision. Everything else supports that: talking to the customer, checking the car’s condition, understanding what the customer still owes, and keeping a record of who did what.

I ran cross-functional product workshops to prioritize capabilities, map the information hierarchy, and decide how each workflow would merge, then validated the design findings with the product owners.

One appraisal page

The result is one appraisal page in MAX. Vehicle details, the appraisal calculator, market data, and book values stay where MAX dealers expect them. The customer offer, customer contact, and photos from ClearCar join them on the same page.

Every way to sell a car, in one place

The center of the page is a single widget I designed to show every way a dealer can move a car: the retail value, the wholesale value, and an ACV Guarantee they can request with one click. It’s the same guarantee I designed for Guaranteed Sale, and I put it right where the dealer is already deciding what to do with the car.

The same widget works on the inventory page and on mobile, so dealers see the same numbers everywhere. The mobile version shipped with positive usability feedback, and from the appraisal page, one tap takes the car into inventory, a flow I designed to take under two minutes.

2026

The 20%, built in code

In 2026 I designed and built one of those ClearCar capabilities inside MAX: the customer offer. It lives on the appraisal page and does exactly what the audit said was worth keeping. Dealers can edit the offer, see its full history (which dealers called out in testing as a huge benefit), text it to the customer, send it to their CRM, or print it.

I built it as a live Storybook prototype that engineering used as the source of truth, and worked through code review with them. More on designing in code in the ClearCar case study →

What dealers told us before launch

A consolidation like this is easy to get wrong in ways that only show up in a dealer’s day. So before launch, I wrote a research protocol and ran targeted usability testing with dealers to check the consolidation decisions against real work. Three things stood out:

• Keep the ClearCar offer simple, and put it higher on the page. Dealers wanted to recognize it instantly, not hunt for it.
• Contacting the customer from the appraisal page was highly valued. It gave dealers a capability they didn’t have in MAX before, without switching tools.
• Offer history was a huge benefit. Every offer stays traceable, which prevents mistakes and makes audits possible.

Testing also surfaced what dealers want next: the ability to customize their own view of the appraisal page and save it. MAX is used by very different teams, and one fixed layout can’t be the right one for all of them.

What changed

• For dealers: one place to appraise a car, talk to the customer, and choose how to sell it, instead of two tools that did almost the same thing.
• For the business: less duplicated engineering, a clear path to retire the ClearCar dealer portal, and capacity redirected to larger bets like vehicle intelligence, inventory management, and pricing.
• For the company: the audit method (feature inventory, workflow mapping, and jobs to be done) is now used to find other consolidation opportunities.
• For me: it made me the cross-platform strategist, owning or supporting 8+ product lines.

What I took away

Sometimes the most strategic product decision is removing a product, not building one. It’s less glamorous, but it’s often higher impact.

The key was being explicit about what to leave behind. “Keep the best of both” sounds good in a meeting, but only a written list of what stays and what goes gets a team to agree.