The context
CDK Global is the dominant software provider for automotive dealerships in North America. In 2018, they made a significant strategic bet: open the platform. Fortellis was the result, an API marketplace designed to let third-party developers build integrations with dealership software, and let dealerships connect their operations across competing vendors.
The business logic was sound. The design problem was formidable.
What made it hard
Fortellis had to serve two fundamentally different users simultaneously:
Developers, technical users who needed a best-in-class developer experience. They would compare Fortellis against Stripe, Twilio, and other modern API platforms. Consumer-grade documentation, clear authentication flows, and a sandbox environment were table stakes.
Dealership operators, business users who needed to understand what the platform could do for them, navigate a marketplace of available integrations, and manage their connected applications without technical support. These users had no patience for API jargon.
Building one product that served both audiences, with a shared design system, coherent information architecture, and a consistent visual language, required careful, deliberate decisions about when to show technical detail and when to abstract it away.
What I designed
The work spanned the full platform surface:
- Developer portal, documentation, API explorer, authentication setup, and a sandbox environment that let developers test integrations before going live
- Marketplace, discovery and evaluation experience for dealerships choosing from available integrations; comparison tools, category browsing, and trust signals
- Application management, the operational console where dealerships configured, monitored, and managed their connected applications
- Design system, component library and visual language shared across all surfaces, designed to be extensible by third-party developers building on the platform
The outcome
Fortellis launched to 150M+ API calls in its first months. More importantly, it established the infrastructure for an automotive commerce ecosystem, the first open platform in an industry that had been largely closed for decades.
The developer experience earned consistent praise in external reviews. The dealership-side marketplace gave smaller software vendors a path to distribution they hadn’t had before.
The design work on Fortellis is some of the most technically complex I’ve done, and some of the most satisfying, precisely because of that complexity.