PowerSocial: Brand-to-Dealer Social at Scale

Overview

Role: Product Owner, UX & Product Timeline: 2025 to Present Stage: Beta / early access (market results pending) Surfaces: A brand portal and a dealer portal, two distinct experiences in one platform

PowerSocial is a brand-to-dealer social media distribution platform. It lets a national brand publish content at scale across its independent dealer network, posting to each dealer's own Facebook and Instagram accounts, while respecting that those accounts are owned and run by independent businesses. I helped conceive it from the ground up, built the first working prototype solo, shaped the build with engineering, and now own it as product owner.

The Challenge

The problem

Brand-to-dealer social distribution is a fundamentally different shape of problem from the one general social tools were built to solve. A national brand with an independent dealer network does not own its dealers' social accounts. Each dealer is an independent business with its own posting calendar, its own local context, and its own editorial judgment. The brand wants distribution at scale; the dealer wants control over what shows up on their page.

When brands tried to bridge that gap at all, they did it with email content packs and shared folders of approved creative. Compliance was poor, brand consistency was worse, and the brand had almost no visibility into whether anything was ever posted.

Why the general tools do not solve it

Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout, Loomly, Buffer, and Later are excellent at one organization managing its own set of social accounts. But they have no concept of the things that make brand-to-dealer distribution work: a permission model that lets a brand push into a dealer's account on terms the dealer agreed to, an opt-in subscription for dealers, multi-brand handling on the dealer side, a skip mechanic, per-location personalization, and a clean separation between the brand's network-wide view and the dealer's local one.

The gap was not a missing feature inside an existing category. It was a category that did not really exist yet for this specific shape of relationship.

My Approach

Discovery first, not a feature spec

The work started with discovery. I spent time with current clients, our sales team, and customer success to understand what brands were actually doing about social at the dealer level and what was breaking. The picture was consistent: brands wanted distribution, dealers wanted control, and the gap was being patched with attachments and folders. I then audited the general social tooling market to confirm that the mismatch was structural, not cosmetic.

A working prototype, built solo

Rather than going straight into a full spec, I used AI-assisted development to build a functioning prototype on my own. It was real enough to show the brand portal, the dealer portal, the eligibility model, the calendar, and the skip flow as living interfaces, not slides. Demoing a working product instead of describing one materially changed the quality of feedback I got from clients and stakeholders, and it let me pressure-test the core hypothesis in actual use before committing engineering time.

That compression matters: a loop that would normally take weeks of design and engineering became something I could iterate on in days, which is how the concept survived contact with real users early enough to count.

Designing for two users with opposing needs

The product starts from the relationship and builds around it:

• The connection stays with the dealer. The brand invites; the dealer opts in and connects their own accounts.
• Subscriptions are opt-in and revocable. A dealer chooses which brands they receive content from and can leave any time.
• Personalization localizes every post. One piece of brand content resolves into a localized post on each dealer's page, with their name, city, phone, and other details filled in.
• Scheduling respects each location. "Morning" content posts in the morning for each dealer's own audience.
• Cross-brand collision avoidance. A minimum gap is enforced per dealer so a store carrying multiple brands does not get back-to-back posts that cannibalize reach.
• A skip mechanic the brand controls. Dealers can decline individual posts where the brand allows it, and skip patterns flow back to the brand as a content-quality signal.

The Customer Journeys

Once the concept earned buy-in, I mapped the full experience end-to-end on both sides of the platform. Five journeys carry the two personas from their first action to the outcome they care about, with the decisions and edge cases that shape each step. This is the artifact I used to align stakeholders and to hand the build a clear, shared picture of how the product should feel.

Results & Reflection

Honest about the stage

PowerSocial is in beta / early access, and market data is still pending. So the strongest claims I can make right now are about the design, the journey, the clarity of the user model, and the quality of stakeholder buy-in, not commercial outcomes. I would rather frame that accurately than overclaim.

What the work shows

• Identifying a category-level gap, not a feature-level one. The framing came from seeing that brand-to-dealer distribution is a different shape of problem and needs a different shape of platform.
• AI-assisted prototyping as a product accelerant. Building a functioning prototype solo let me validate before spending engineering time, and it is a practice I now reach for by default.
• Designing for conflicting needs. The brand wants scale; the dealer wants control. The product had to give both without making either feel subordinate.
• Owning the loop end to end. Discovery, concept, prototype, buy-in, journey mapping, build partnership, and now ownership, with the same person in the seat across every phase.

Current role

As product owner, I co-demo PowerSocial with sales to existing customers and prospects, and I treat each demo as a research session: where the workflow has friction, what resonates, and what would unlock more value for the segment in the room. That feedback maps directly into the enhancements I scope and prioritize next.

PowerSocial is the clearest example of how I work: find the gap the category missed, prove it with something real, and stay in the seat from the first sketch through ownership.