Discovery Research for DAT's Carrier Management Suite
A two-phase blue-sky study that reframed DAT's approach to fraud, trust, and market opportunity.
$4.93M
Carrier Management Suite MRR, Q4 2025
57% → 83%
Broker load board CSAT, Q4 2023 to Q1 2025 (Quarterly surveys, ±5 points at 95% confidence.)
How I ran it
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Product and design were iterating in real time and couldn't wait five weeks.
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As someone new to freight, I let themes emerge bottom-up to get a raw view of the ecosystem, and paired that with codes tied to the research goals to keep the study focused.
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Greg and I aligned on the coding scheme increase our confidence and agreeability. Any theme we didn't agree on was marked tentative, not reported as a finding.
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Initial Interviews earned directional support while informing our initial prototype concepts for testing during DATCON 2023. Two quantitative surveys with overlapping questions at the start of 2024 confirmed the findings across company sizes and roles.
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Recruiting through DAT's own load board gave fast, reliable access, but meant we only heard from current DAT users, not competitors' customers. The survivor bias was accepted by the business near term while while we sanity checked through our Bain engagement.
Coded observations clustered into themes, then mapped to the study's deliverables.
What We Found
What fraud cost brokers. In the study, brokers estimated a single fraud-impacted load cost them about $100,000, before any damage to shipper relationships or future sales, and one enterprise broker with about $300 million in annual revenue reported roughly $300,000 in losses per quarter. Those estimates earned directional support. In the first half of 2024, I ran two follow-up surveys with overlapping questions. About 70% of respondents reported direct losses (±5 points at 95% confidence), and nearly every brokerage with more than five employees had experienced at least double brokering. That's more conservative than the 85% in a 2023 FreightWaves and TriumphPay survey, partly because unsure respondents counted as no, and independent agents and small niche brokerages were often unaware of losses or too small to be targeted. Segment-level results were directional, which is why I ran the second survey. Together, the estimates and surveys became the basis for the PRD and for DAT One's overall 2024 to 2025 strategy and business case.
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Brokers jumped to 4 to 7 outside tools to vet carriers. DAT dominated one capacity match point, public (spot) truck and load search, and had to defend it before competitors built trust tools elsewhere.
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Carrier trust needs were underserved because the market didn't reward serving them, which made them a moat opportunity.
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"The broker" wasn't one persona. Compliance team members, cradle-to-grave brokers, and carrier sales reps each touched vetting differently. At mid-size and larger brokerages, where those roles are split beyond just the single “cradle-to-grave" broker, handoffs between them were where context got lost or touchpoints changed. On the carrier side, owner-operators and carrier dispatchers vetted brokers in their own ways. And 22% of DAT One web users identified as third-party dispatchers, a segment deliberately deferred due to regulatory complexity.
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MC numbers sold on the dark web for as little as $20, so a carrier's record meant nothing if the identity behind it was fake. Carriers wouldn't hand over more data without a reason and had privacy concerns of their own. The key was to facilitate a system which supported a “carrot” not “stick” approach to making verification incentivized in order to facilitate effective adoption. Simply put: “Verified carriers get more loads”.
Persona Examples
Research defined what we needed to know; product sourced the vendors; I partnered with product and design to prioritize and integrate their capabilities, work that continued through 2024 and 2025.
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A shared trust layer for vetting, combining FMCSA safety and authority data with live insurance coverage through a partnership with Certificial. Brokers can pull a carrier's current certificate of insurance directly in DAT, and carriers who keep it up to date gain visibility with brokers. Shipped as an MVP and iterated across releases; the partnership is still in use today.
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Vetting built directly into search results, so brokers could filter by safety rating, age of authority, and insurance minimums. Reduced the clicks-to-search ratio by 8.73% at 95% confidence against a control group, as brokers left DAT less often to check carriers.
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Walled garden and identity verification. A higher registration bar (USDOT and MC validation, FMCSA-verified contact information, proof of insurance, and tax ID) plus multifactor authentication, with progressive profiling that rewards carriers for disclosing more. With Jaime Salazar, the senior product manager for the DAT One load board, I worked on the spoofing protections: in Q3 2023, blocking outside contact details in load postings cut comment fraud by 97%, closing a common spoofing route [link]. The identity work extended into a partnership with Verosint on AI-powered identity verification; Verosint reported 49,000 attacks blocked in the first 90 days.
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Search assumes brokers are out looking, but much of vetting happens on inbound: carriers calling and emailing about loads, compliance teams processing onboarding requests, and a final check before a load is assigned. So the trust layer worked in both directions. Brokers could post loads visible only to carriers who met their qualification criteria, gating inbound interest instead of filtering it afterward, and the same checks extended across DAT Company Search, DAT OnBoard for compliance teams, TMS integrations at the moment a load is assigned or a new carrier is added, and AI-driven email and phone qualification through DAT's partnership with Parade's CoDriver.
Original working artifact, 2023.
Early DAT Walled Garden
What I’d do differently
“John is a sharp and seasoned UX researcher who consistently uncovers deep customer insights and translates them into clear, strategic product recommendations. He’s not just a researcher—he’s a true thought partner and one of the most collaborative, reliable teammates I’ve worked with. His work doesn’t just inform decisions—it drives them.”
6 Personas
Adopted org-wide for product planning, GTM, and research recruitment
Seeing The Fraud Problem Before The Business Did
In 2023, fraud wasn't on DAT's radar, even though 65% of the US spot freight market ran through its load board. Everyone was looking backward. DAT One had launched without feature parity with DAT Power and ran slower, customer pushback flooded in, and new leadership was drowning in that noise while ramping up. People were talking; nobody was looking forward.
I'd just come from TriumphPay (Triumph Financial), where I mentored my team through mapping the payments flywheel, so I knew exactly what was coming. Fraud was already a measurable, recurring cost flowing through a network handling $25 billion a year in payments. I knew the same alarms existed at DAT. Nobody had built them yet.
So I went looking in the data we had. A Tableau dashboard tracked the legacy DAT Onboard product, and Mixpanel covered DAT One. NPS was already low after the post-COVID freight downturn and the rocky launch, so I ran a thematic analysis filtering specifically for feedback about bad actors. Secondary research showed industry fraud up 59% year over year, and a new vetting entrant, Highway, had just launched.
I compiled it into a discovery wall with Kyle Patterson, the senior product manager leading DAT Directory, and Greg Rad, our senior designer. Together we reframed the question: does DAT have a right to win in trust, before someone else claims it?
We took it to the director of product and design and secured a tiger team to investigate. Internally, the effort got a name: Operation Speedboat.
First brokers and then carriers: Each session combined job shadowing, semi-structured interviews, and prototype testing: 12 brokers, then 12 carriers, recruited through intercepts on DAT's own load board. Running them in sequence let me test what brokers said against what carriers experienced.
What Shipped
Early Company Profile Example
Early Carrier Qualification Filters
January 2025 Carrier Management Suite
Outcomes
Keeping it funded through a rebuild. The research first earned two scrum teams, then had to survive a new CPO and CTO, a $5M Bain strategy engagement, and repeated engineering reassignments. We asked for four teams and got two, until a competitive analysis wargamed with the CPO secured funding to scale to four. By 2024 it was one of only five company goals, and the only new product. Even the ML risk engine needed trust work: to address legal's liability concerns, we framed its output as "insights" within the Company Profile.
I introduced the broker CSAT baseline in Q4 2023. The lift since reflects both this work and parallel load board improvements whose strategy I led.
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Make executive alignment an intake requirement.
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Intercepts worked once I stopped relying on marketing and sales.
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Not mid build. Identified limitations in our ability to integrate with Transport Management Systems.
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Not just when the workload forces it.
References
Widespread double brokering wreaks havoc on brokers and carriers in Q2, Triumph, 2023 (FreightWaves and TriumphPay survey)
DAT's New Risk-Assessment Engine Enables Unprecedented Industry Trust and Transparency, Business Wire, October 2023
What's new in DAT's fight against fraud, DAT blog, October 2023, updated February 2024
DAT strengthens leadership team with two key executive appointments, Business Wire, January 2024
Verosint Empowers DAT Freight & Analytics To Crush Account Fraud With AI, Business Wire, February 2024
DAT releases agenda for DATCON24 in Kansas City, Business Wire, August 2024
Carrier Management Suite walkthrough, DAT on YouTube, January 2025
Key takeaways from DAT's latest broker Launch and Learn, DAT blog (archived), April 2025
DAT, Parade integration automates broker-carrier communications, DAT, July 2025
DAT introduces Carrier Management Suite, integrating carrier vetting into DAT One, Business Wire, October 2025
Know who you're working with: Company Search in DAT One, DAT blog
DAT adds integrations to support thousands of TMS users, DAT
Carrier Management Suite for brokers, DAT infographic (PDF)
Certificial, DAT One Help Center