DAT iQ — Freight Intelligence Platform. Rates, lanes, market conditions, and forecasts unified in a single configurable interface. Built from zero over nine months as a founding design team member.
Joined as a founding team member to design DAT iQ from the ground up — a modular, real-time freight analytics platform that consolidated five legacy tools into a single intelligence layer, and secured $3M in executive budget through a multi-year product vision.
DAT had the best freight data in the industry. Decades of rate history, real-time load board, market intelligence that brokers and carriers depended on daily. None of it was accessible at the speed decisions actually get made. Five separate products, none of them connected, none of them built for the way the market moved in 2020.
Rateview, Ratecast, FMIC, MCI, Lanemakers — each useful in isolation. A broker trying to quote a spot rate, plan capacity, and track lane volatility was jumping between all five. The platform wasn't the problem. The absence of a platform was.
Design DAT iQ from the ground up — a modular, real-time, data-driven platform — custom analytics, forecasts, and recommendations — built as a strategic business intelligence tool. Build not just the product, but the multi-year vision to secure the budget to build it.
I joined as part of the founding team, responsible for the full design — concept to high-fidelity — and for building a vision compelling enough to unlock significant executive investment. Within nine months, we delivered both.
Before any design work, we defined what success looked like across business, product, and design. These weren't aspirational statements. They became the filter for every design decision and the spine of the pitch that secured the budget.
The first decision was what DAT iQ was not. Not a replacement for DAT One — the tactical load board and daily transaction tool. The intelligence layer above it. Brokers needed something to help them think ahead. DAT One was for today. iQ was for next week and next quarter.
The most important deliverable wasn't a screen. It was the roadmap that unlocked the budget. Three stages: a Smallest Lovable Core consolidating the five legacy tools, a Growth phase adding marketplace infrastructure, and a Scale phase that let customers build on top of the platform. Each stage had clear milestones. The pitch was the vision — the design made it credible.
The three-stage vision — presented directly to DAT leadership — was the design artifact that secured millions of dollars in platform development budget. Outlining a clear strategic roadmap demonstrated that DAT iQ wasn't a one-off product, but a long-term platform investment with compounding returns.
With five legacy tools to consolidate and a three-stage vision to architect, the IA work was as much strategic as it was structural. The high-level IA map defined how existing DAT data products would map to the new platform's navigation — dashboards, rates, lanes, notifications, tools, account, and analytics — and color-coded each node against the v1.0, Growth, and Scale delivery phases.
The freight industry isn't monolithic. A carrier planning capacity three months out needs different tools than a broker quoting a spot rate this afternoon. The design system for DAT iQ was built around a core principle of flexibility: modular widgets and configurable dashboards that users could arrange around their specific workflows, without sacrificing depth or analytical power.
Both light and dark themes were designed from the outset — dark for data-dense analytical views, light for lane management and operational contexts. The result was a platform that adapted to the environment and task at hand, rather than imposing a single visual mode on every user interaction.
Early design exploration focused on the dashboard architecture — how to present rate history, lane performance, market conditions, and forecasts in a single configurable view without overwhelming users. The sketches established the widget-based layout, the left navigation model, and the chart/map/table composition that would carry through to final designs.
The custom dashboard was the entry point for every DAT iQ session — a configurable home base where users could surface the metrics most relevant to their role. Rate trends, lane performance, market condition indices, and forecast data were all available as widgets, arranged to match individual workflows.
The rates experience was the core of DAT iQ v1.0 — consolidating Rateview and Ratecast into a single view that could show national rate history, per-lane spot and contract rates, fuel-adjusted figures, and short-term forecasts in a single, filterable interface. The business calendar view gave brokers a forward-looking rate planning tool that didn't exist anywhere in the existing DAT product suite.
Lane management was the operational center of gravity for brokers and shippers who needed to track performance across dozens or hundreds of freight lanes simultaneously. The lanes experience let users build a personal lane portfolio, monitor rate movements and volatility, and drill into individual lane detail with historical performance, market conditions, and forecasted rate changes.
That was the opening line of the executive pitch. Not positioning copy — the north star for nine months of design decisions. Create clarity. Deliver smart notifications. Analyze business performance. Automate action. Optimize transactions.
The vision secured $3M in budget. The design delivered the platform. I hired and onboarded a senior designer before leaving so it didn't stall when I moved to Orderful.
Nine months. Zero to one. Five legacy products consolidated into a single platform, a three-stage vision that unlocked $3M in budget, and a senior designer hired and onboarded before I left. The design work was the business case. Both had to hold up.