Leader Spotlight: Looking for innovation in even the smallest areas, with Michael Harker
Mike Harker is the Vice President of Product and Design at Ritchie Bros., a company that supports businesses in buying and selling commercial and transportation equipment. He holds a BA in Systems Engineering and began his career in technology and startup companies before receiving his MBA from the Wharton School. Mike held corporate and business development and strategy roles while at SAP in their leadership development program. Before joining Ritchie Bros, he served as a Director of Product Management at Comcast, delivering the first software products in the multifamily space.
In this conversation, Michael discusses leading digital transformation at Ritchie Bros., the cultural shifts that followed, and how his team scales customer-driven innovation.
Modernizing legacy systems and processes
To start, could you introduce Ritchie Bros. and your offering?
We’re the largest marketplace that helps buyers and sellers to transact heavy equipment and transportation equipment — everything from construction machinery to 18-wheelers. We started as an auction company 70 years ago, and we've grown steadily through acquisitions and our digital initiatives. Our focus now is on blending online and offline experiences to maximize value for our customers.
The goals have always been to attract more people to the auction and to deliver a greater return for our sellers, but for a long time, those were treated as two distinct initiatives. Over time, we’ve worked to optimize the entire value stream. Sellers care most about price return — if they sell at a fixed price and it doesn't transact, they can then cascade down and ultimately end up in an auction. That’s what our core business is today: online digital auctions.
How did you decide where to begin modernizing legacy tech and systems?
We started by looking at where our customer experience lags consumer industries. Since we tend to be 5–10 years behind those industries, we asked ourselves, "What part of our business could be modernized in a way that already feels familiar?"
Ironically, we started at the end of the customer journey, with checkout. Historically, every transaction required manual intervention — human touchpoints. We're dealing with large, commercial equipment and transport items, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't focus on automating the process.
And it wasn’t just automating the tech. The biggest challenge was changing the internal processes, like how we collect money and pay consignors.
Transforming a culture at large
Were there any concerns about how people would respond to this kind of modernization?
Yes — on both the buyer side and on the seller side. On the buyer side, people were comfortable with the way that they'd been operating. We delivered a new digital checkout that offered more payment methods, but people were hesitant at first. They wanted to trust the transaction, and they asked, "Well, why can't I just wire the money the way I always have?"
There was a similar sentiment on the seller side. They were accustomed to a white-glove experience, so when we tried to create a more robust slate of digital options for them, they weren’t necessarily interested. They didn’t want to log in or provide banking information — they wanted to pay us to do that for them. So it’s been a process of influencing customer behavior.
Beyond digital transformation, how has the internal culture embraced these changes?
We initially expected that the technology would be easier to work with than it actually is, and also that employees would be more averse to the change. But we have a healthy culture of pushing for effective transformation, and our team embraced the change more than we anticipated.
Our leadership advocates a “one team, all in” mindset. We're not here just to punch in and do our individual tasks. We're here to set commitments and deliver on those commitments for our customers.
This has really helped our teams understand how their work is connected and how it impacts others. We've reduced operational burdens by automating parts of the checkout, for instance, and a small portion of the work has been shifted to finance. When you think about that in a silo, it looks like giving more work to one group.
But the net impact on the organization and customers alike is positive. Setting those clear outcomes and contexts helps everyone understand how changes like this help us deliver on commitments to our customers.
Managing both sides of a marketplace
Coming from outside this industry, how did you adjust your approach to product management to accommodate this new context?
It was a big adjustment. When you work in product management in FAANG or big tech companies, there’s easy access to data. There’s a greater ability to test quickly and get rapid feedback from customers.
When I started here, we didn’t have the data infrastructure to build hypotheses, we didn't have experimentation tools for A/B testing, so we had to focus on deeply understanding our users. A key opportunity for the product emerged in building better tools for our employees. Previously, everything was siloed, but we realized that we could create a more integrated approach to solving for the overall customer journey supported by employees.
Another interesting lesson was that while we get excited about these opportunities to use technology, in many cases, seeing manual processes onsite really grounded our thinking in what was and wasn’t working.
Since your product engages two sides of a marketplace — buyers and sellers — how do you address the friction between them?
This friction is inherent in marketplaces, and especially in auctions. Buyers want good deals, and sellers want maximum returns. We’re a sell-side marketplace, and our value proposition is that we offer access to the most buyers globally for commercial equipment. That attracts sellers, and it also prompts sellers to think about what we provide. Maybe they can sell with a competitor with a lower commission rate, but the price won’t be as good.
And while commission rates matter, outcomes and customer experience do too. We’ve been shifting to a focus on solving core needs in ways that align better with our business model.
Addressing unique customer problems and pain points
Earlier, you mentioned employees being willing to change their ways of working. How have new technologies shifted people’s day-to-day roles?
There has been some transformation of certain roles, and many of them have become more specialized, which is ultimately better for our customers. Historically, our teams were generalists who would go above and beyond for any customer, which could lead to exceptions that were very time-consuming.
When you're willing to do anything, everything's an exception — and that’s not scalable. We introduced new systems, training employees for the work that should be 80–90 percent of what we do, like customer care, while building some more scalable processes to handle the one-offs.
How do you distinguish between user resistance and real system issues?
It is tough to separate people who don't want to change from people who are flagging a fundamental issue. We monitor customer feedback closely, and if something is coming up repeatedly, that’s usually an indication that it’s real. We’ll also get on the phone with customers to speak to them directly and uncover root causes of problems, which are not always related to their initial concerns.
We’ve built a new suite of tools that allows us to iterate more quickly, and it’s been a huge positive change for us. And since our sales team is often the first ones to hear a complaint from a customer, having their support on these initiatives is a great indication that we’re moving in the right direction.
Even though we’re a big company going through transformation, we're making real efforts to improve consignors' experiences.
Being a trusted, integral part of customers’ lives
How do you keep teams motivated to still be innovative and creative in a high-constraint environment?
In some ways, I think our constraints can actually help to fuel innovation. When the world is your oyster, it’s easy to be distracted by possibilities. If you can start with a narrower focus, you’re often better off. We emphasize that not all innovation has to be transformative — small wins really matter and can have an out-sized impact.
We might joke about using AI to match equipment to the size hole you need to dig — and one day, maybe that will be possible — but the reality is that even small, data-driven improvements can add meaningful value for our customers.
I mentioned earlier that big tech companies often have vast quantities of data at their disposal to drive decisions. We're now at the point where we can build the data foundation that’ll unlock much more in the coming years.
What has been the biggest surprise about working in product in this industry?
One of the biggest surprises for me has been the significance of in-person interactions. There are a lot of digital tools that can help connect you to customers, but there are some insights you’ll only get from shadowing people in the field. Data can tell you a lot, and it’s a great foundation, but it can’t always tell you the personal stories.
Unless you’re in the field, you wouldn’t know another surprising lesson, which is that for many people, we are the retirement plan. Farmers rely on us to sell their land, their equipment,and their homes. Those auctions are their retirement plan.
We have a customer who told his wife, “If anything ever happens to me, the first phone call I want you to make is my Ritchie rep." That level of trust is humbling. It shows we’re not just a marketplace — we’re a vital part of our customers’ lives.