I had worked at Liberty Mutual for some time before starting to work on the two portals (Liberty Mutual and Safeco) that insurance agents use. It became obvious that if a strategy project were to take place, I would have to take it upon myself to plan it, align with others in the organization, and execute. I worked hard to turn insights into priorities, and priorities into prototypes that would help make sense of the massive resources that the portals represented. From there, I engaged in a careful design process moving from ever high levels of fidelity until as a team we arrived at a plan for development that involve the construction of a minimum viable product accompanied by clear metrics to help answer the question: did we solve the problem?
After extensive interviews that resulted in over 70 pages of transcripts, I asked some colleagues to review the data and highlight any relevant or surprising information. I then then turned each of these highlights into a PostIt note, and worked with these colleagues to find affinities between the various comments agents made. These affinities would help me to identify themes and major problems, which I then featured in a several page article I wrote and shared with project allies.
I favor of the "jobs to be done" framework, so I created a spreadsheet of tasks that agents sought to complete over the course of their day. The "jobs to be done" helped immensely to develop possible key performance indicators for how effectively we helped agents perform these tasks. It also helped provide the basis for service blueprints. I made one of these blueprints for each job, mapping all the steps the agent had to take to complete the tasks, what resources or features they required, and our role in that. This shed a lot of light on points of friction across several different journeys.
It was decided based in part on strategy work as well as business imperatives that we would focus our efforts on redesigning the homepage of the Safeco portal. Informed by all the research that I had done, I was able to more easily envision what this page would look like, what it would be used for, and what agent expectations for the page would be. A combination of easy access to the most important tools, encouragement to visit areas of the portal like rewards and news, and dashboard features to keep agents informed about their business, the new start page promises to be a great leap forward. My initial sketch has been provided and higher resolution can be provided privately upon request.