Building a Daily Habit

OPENLANE (Canada's largest wholesale vehicle auction platform) runs a three-tier dealer subscription: Standard, ProFocus, and ProPower. ProPower is the top tier. Internally, the work falls under "dealer ops and subscriptions." The goal is eventually a single pane of glass where dealers come to de-risk their capital. We are incrementally building toward that in 2026. I co-own ProPower with the design lead at OPENLANE: we set the features, pricing, and discount structures for dealer groups and volume accounts. The subscription has to justify its cost in dealer outcomes, not just coverage.

OPENLANE holds the majority of Canada's wholesale vehicle auction market. That changes the product question. With the TAM largely captured, winning more dealers at any cost is no longer the play. The target metric shifts from dealer retention to net revenue retention: upsells and expansions, net of downgrades and churn.

The product question is what makes a dealer come back to ProPower every day, and what makes them stay on the top tier when renewal comes around. Engagement that does not tie to renewal is decoration, and renewal without engagement is a contract that will not survive contact with a competitor.

The first option was to build ProPower as an inventory dashboard, a surface where dealers could see what they have, filter and sort it, export it. The problem is that dashboards are reference tools, not habits. Dealers visit when they need them, not every day.

The second option was to position ProPower as a replacement for the DMS, the dealer management systems that franchises use as their operational backbone. The problem is that dealers do not want two sources of truth, and our sales reps cannot rip out something the dealer already pays for.

The third option was to build ProPower as an analytics product, surfacing wholesale comps, retail trends, and dealer benchmarks. The problem is that this is exactly what Market GuideOPENLANE's wholesale comp data tool. Shows historical sold data for comparable vehicles to help dealers price and appraise inventory. (OPENLANE's wholesale comp data tool, available on our lower tiers) already does. Building this would be expanding Market Guide, not building something that justifies upgrading to the top tier.

The fourth option was to build ProPower as the place where a dealer comes every day to answer one question: where is my money at risk, and what do I do about it. If the product consistently surfaces the next best action and the dealer acts on it, trust accumulates, habit forms, and the dealer comes back tomorrow.

Option 4 maps to how the dealer already thinks, because dealers do not navigate to abstract metrics, they navigate to dollars. "Where am I bleeding?" is a question they ask themselves whether or not we build a product for it, and if we are the place that answers it well, we are in their day.

The execution stages in three phases. Signal earns its place by surfacing risk in dollars per unit. Notify earns the right to Automate only when alerts measurably lead to dealer action, which means anything that does not produce a listing, a reprice, or a recon decision gets cut. Automate then unlocks once outcomes consistently match the signal across a class of recommendations, at which point the dealer's role shifts from monitoring to exception management. The data flywheel below shows what those three phases sit on top of and what daily use compounds into.

The wedge segment falls out of the diagram. Wholesale-first dealers (specialty operators who trade thinly traded trims, watch unsold runs, and live on bid activity) are the segment where Canada's wholesale liquidity matters most, and they are also the segment whose adoption compounds the loop fastest, because their use of the product strengthens the same wholesale liquidity signal that every other dealer's recommendations depend on. Trust earned there is worth more than incremental progress in a contested segment, and the data architecture flows outward from that wedge.

The framing also clarifies what we should not build: if a feature does not make dealer capital risk more visible, more actionable, or more manageable, it is not something we should be packaging into ProPower, and the prioritization arguments have gotten significantly shorter as a result.

One additional surface we are planning is to let ProPower dealers white-label a retail site hosted by us, so lead generation flows directly into their inventory management surface. When a consumer submits a trade-in through the dealer's retail site, it lands directly in MyLotOPENLANE's inventory management surface for dealers. The place where dealers manage, appraise, and list vehicles for auction or retail. (OPENLANE's inventory management tool), which closes the loop between the retail and wholesale surfaces and extends the stickiness case beyond the auction flow.

Anchoring on MyLotOPENLANE's inventory management surface for dealers. The place where dealers manage, appraise, and list vehicles for auction or retail. as the daily inventory check means deprioritizing other surfaces. ProPower could have spread across appraisal, retail listing, syndication, and reporting, and the near-term cost of not doing that is a slower feature-parity story with vAutoCox Automotive's dominant retail analytics platform, widely used by franchise dealers. One of OPENLANE's main competitive references in the dealer tools space. migrators, who expect a full retail analytics suite before switching. The bet is that depth in the right surface compounds faster than breadth across the wrong ones.

Independents and franchises behave so differently that ProPower has to be two surfaces that share infrastructure rather than one product. Independents optimize for speed and low overhead, often without a clean system of record, so the surface that works for them is push-based recommendations and one-click actions rather than a dashboard to navigate, which is why the AI Upload path and the daily money-at-risk triage list both sit on the independent side. Franchises and groups care about consistency, policy adherence, and multi-rooftop oversight, so the surface that works for them is multi-rooftop inventory views, internal trades, audit trails down to the rep, and look-to-book measurement, all running alongside the DMS rather than trying to replace it. Franchises will not rip out a DMS for a competitor, but they will let a complement earn space on the day-to-day home screen.

The third segment is the wholesale-first wedge described earlier, the smallest of the three but the one where OPENLANE's transaction volume advantage is most defensible. Trust earned there compounds the loop for every other segment downstream, which is why the wedge sits where it does in the strategy rather than being treated as a niche.

Phase 1 of the Signal layer has shipped. The first signal live is wholesale margin: each vehicle's relationship between today's wholesale price and the dealer's cost basis, surfaced as a flag on which units are underwater and by how much. The number is not a datapoint, it is an action prompt. The 2026 work follows from four ranked problems the framing produced.

1. Money-at-risk prioritization dealers believe. An ordered queue of inventory risk grounded in real market signals. For groups, aged inventory visibility plus an operational discipline loop that prevents aging drift across rooftops. For independents, a daily triage list of which units need repricing, wholesaling, reconditioning, or listing today.
2. Trust and interpretability. Dealers will not act on recommendations they cannot defend. Some need transparency. Some need control. Some need outcomes. The product needs all three lanes, smartly defaulted.
3. Low-friction switching. Double entry is the adoption blocker dealers cite most. Removing it is a prerequisite for habit.
4. Minimum viable completeness by segment. vAuto power users need parity on retail ranking, history views, role-based controls, build sticker integrations. Non-vAuto independents need baseline coverage on appraisal, inventory management, forms. Franchises need DMS integrations. Table stakes, not differentiators, but missing them blocks conversion.

Next in the Signal layer: retail "what if" scenarios that show a dealer the price they need to hit to be the lowest or most competitive in their geographic area. The pattern across all of it is the same reframe, from datapoints and insights to consequence-first signals that tell a dealer what to do, not just what is true. The renewal case for the top tier rests on whether daily use forms before the renewal conversation starts. The framing also produced a clean answer to what we are not building: no generic dashboard, no DMS replacement, no feature parity with vAuto unless it intersects with the daily risk check.

I would have been louder about my vision earlier, in the first month or two after joining. When I arrived there was no clear direction from product leadership and the team was tactically responsive, reacting to whoever was loudest, without anyone stepping back to ask why any of it was being done in the first place. I recognized the pattern but did not confront it directly soon enough, even though I had the framing the team needed and should have pushed it earlier rather than waiting until I had more context to justify it. The context I already had was enough.