Cox Automotive

Cox Automotive is a global leader in automotive services and technology, powering brands such as Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, and Dealer.com with end-to-end solutions across the entire vehicle lifecycle.

Retailer UX Team

My team owned the end-to-end experience for dealership managers, salespeople, finance managers, and customers finalizing their purchase. I served as the subject-matter expert for manager and salesperson workflows.

Highlights:

1 - Aligning agile release trains to deliver profit-focused dealmaking guardrails

Manager View provides dealership managers with a dedicated dashboard to review, compare, and approve deals efficiently. It offers deeper visibility into deal structures—including lender options, financing scenarios, document status, and trade-appraisal data—so managers can make faster, more informed decisions.

Managers make pricing and appraisal calls that should reflect the store's inventory strategy; however, the necessary context often sits outside the deal workflow. Dealers rely on vAuto—a Cox Automotive product used by appraisers for appraisal and inventory insights—or comparable tools for market trends and performance, while day-to-day work happens in Manager View. Switching systems, finding the right record, and re-entering values adds delay and error, where a few missteps can wipe out profitability.

After a shopper estimates their trade-in online, the store still must assign an Actual Cash Value (ACV)—Manager View doesn't clearly prompt for this step; both the shopper's estimate and the appraisal record live in vAuto, and score and stocking/provisioning insights are checked separately, producing inconsistent data, rework, and decisions without intended guardrails.

To move this forward across organizational lines, I:

• Coordinated with the vAuto program, which operates under a separate Agile Release Train (ART) with its own roadmap and timelines

• Engaged the vAuto UX team to understand the appraiser's workflow end-to-end

• Partnered with the vAuto Product team to map current capabilities and near-term plans

• Found overlapping initiatives already aimed at narrowing the gap between appraisers and managers

• Partnered with vAuto Product on joint research with dealership managers to validate insights

• Facilitated a series of alignment sessions to work through the friction between our ARTs' conflicting roadmaps

• Reached a shared proposal that both groups could support

Results:

I designed an integrated experience that brings essential appraisal and profitability context into the deal workflow. Within the Trade-In section, I incorporated the existing vAuto ProfitTime widget—a compact dashboard element displaying each vehicle's ProfitTime score and stocking insights—so managers could evaluate deal profitability without switching systems. I also added a status indicator to reflect appraisal progress, notifications showing when and by whom the ACV was last updated, and logic to lock the ACV field once vAuto pushed a new value. A direct link to the corresponding vAuto record completed the loop, ensuring transparency and data consistency across tools.

The solution gave managers the visibility and context they needed to make more consistent, profitable deal decisions directly within Manager View. It also advanced a broader business goal—strengthening customer trust in the accuracy and reliability of Cox Automotive's data.