Global P&C Insurance New Venture
The Challenge
The insurance industry is lagging behind and hasn't kept up with the changing needs of users over time. As a result, Small Commercial Business owners have to purchase multiple policies through Brokers and various channels to meet all their needs, which leads to significant coverage gaps and a complicated user experience. Moreover, the current policies are full of insurance jargon that most business users don't understand and have difficulty accessing a digital experience.
My Role
Our goal was to create a project accelerator that implementation teams could easily set up and customize according to specific state requirements. To achieve this, we had to carefully decide where to draw the line to ensure that the solution was comprehensive, while also being flexible enough to meet the needs of various practice models. I took charge of the team and led them through a series of story mapping and product vision workshops to identify the minimum viable product (MVP), prioritize existing stories in the backlog, and ultimately guide the product roadmap.
At crucial points in the project, we gathered insurance thought leaders and operational experts from across the country for a set of Service Design Workshops. During these sessions, participants were encouraged to share their perspectives, challenge assumptions, ignore constraints, and explore unexpected solutions. This led to the creation of over 50 high-value features that were incorporated into the service design framework. As the Design Lead, my responsibility was to plan the workshops, facilitate all of the activities, and then quickly synthesize learnings and document concepts so they could be shared with the project team.
The Approach
To build the overall venture, the team focused on three major themes, including product strategy, product design & ideation, and service design. By narrowing the process to these three themes, the team was able to incorporate user research and trends, test solutions and rapid prototypes, and define the resources and processes to manage the overall venture.
Product Strategy - Defined the product strategy and value proposition of the new venture and product. Built and implemented the product's journey to create the ultimate user experience simplifying the insurance industry as we know it.
Product Design & Ideation - Conducted research to develop a deeper understanding of insurance users. Brainstormed and generated a range of potential solutions and features to build a prototype to test the experience with key customers.
Service Design - Organized and built the new venture operations, resources, and processes to maximize the employee experience, creating the best overall customer experience in insurance.
The Solution
Introduced a new Small Commercial Insurance Venture that simplifies the process of protecting an entire business with a single three-page comprehensive policy. The aim is to remove all the convoluted jargon and provide non-jargon-filled, easy-to-understand coverage that will protect businesses - people, property, and operations.
The policy is simple and straightforward, designed to be easy-to-follow, and just three pages long. Customers no longer have to worry about separate policies and insurers for their operations, people, and property. With the comprehensive policy, customers can protect your entire business with just one policy.
The policy is also cost-effective, offering the best value for money. Customers can avoid overlapping coverage and costly middlemen, and the policy is priced for the specific risks of the business and guarantees the policy will cost 20% less than comparable coverage.
The Result
After seven months of designing products and services, we successfully launched a new insurance venture.
A new insurance product was launched in four states during FY19, resulting in a net written premium of +$25M. All 15 full-time employees were hired and trained before the product launch. This product received recognition as the first digitally immersive human-centered insurance product and was highlighted at the Global Insurer Investors Summit.
