This is the first of many featured work articles I’ll post. This one is about a self-service feature I led the design on for Travelers.

Goal

Reduce friction in the post-sales process for personal insurance customers.

The Story

This project began with an idea for a solution that centered around a recently published paper on artificial intelligence. While the concept was exciting, it lacked focus about who would benefit from the solution and why. I worked with the team the team to take a step back from the technical implementation of the solution and understand the problem we were trying to solve.

I decided to try a week-long design sprint. The sprint followed the plan and concepts outlined in The Sprint Book. The outcomes from the sprint week were:

  1. The product had a concrete goal
  2. Underwriters and claims professionals were talked to which gave the team a better understanding of the problem
  3. Concepts created addressed an actual problem rather than blindly attempted to use a technology
  4. The new artificial intelligence breakthrough was still part of the “winning” concept, but the proposed use was different than the original concept
  5. A prototype was created that validated what we learned with potential users of the app and business owners

A picture of the design sprint room at the end of the week

After the sprint week ended the product manager and I looked at everything we learned and started to plan the first iteration. Since this product manager was new to the role and working in agile environments I provided training on the goals of story writing and how to write a good story. I shared everything I had learned from past work with Pivotal Labs and my experience on other agile products. We took some of the persona work and story mapping we had done in the design sprint to write stories that were focused on delivering small pieces of value to the users who fit in the personas.