Defining a New Insurance Product for SMEs Through User Research

🏁 The challenge

An energy company specialized in the free energy market (an alternative to the regulated energy market) had its Account Executives managing client relationships in an operational and paternalistic manner for many years. They were heavily involved in the daily activities and needs of their customers. However, as the company’s client portfolio grew, this paternalistic approach became unsustainable, avoiding scalability.

Based on this scenario, the following question guided the discovery process:

How might the Product Department support Account Executives in performing more strategically to manage their client portfolio?

Understanding future scenarios was essential in defining the preferable role of account executives, helping to avoid the probable future that is largely shaped by current behavior.

It is important to acknowledge that if we don’t build the environment to foster the future we want for the role of the Account Executives, we risk drifting into the probable future, shaped by the natural progression of existing behavior, rather than the future we preferred for the role.

A 3-week discovery phase based on concept testing was proposed to address the main question through three key stages:

1. Empathizing with Account Executives to understand the problem;

2. Internal ideation and prototyping;

3. Concept testing with clients.

3 Exploratory interviews

To address solutions for the frame hypothesis, the team conducted ideation sessions based on “Crazy 8” to generate a wide range of diverse ideas that could be implemented by the product team. These ideas were then prioritized by the design team, along with PMs and tech leads, using a matrix that evaluated potential impact on users against development effort.

In the third stage, the team was responsible for conducting one-on-one interviews to test concepts using prototypes with users. The goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the problem by guiding the conversation through these concepts.

• 6 Interviews for concept testing with clients.

• 4 Analysis sessions to convert insights into actionable next steps.

Throughout the process, the team developed a roadmap of validated ideas, prioritized based on user pain points against minimal development effort. These ideas were classified into three categories: NOW, NEXT, and LATER.

As a “NOW” action, we defined a predictive solution to proactively inform clients in advance through a simple, bi-weekly email. This email could significantly reduce the need for users to reach out to Account Executives directly.

📜 Conclusions and Learnings

Concept Prototypes as a Trigger for Deeper Conversations

Foster conversations by presenting concept prototypes proved to be a quick and effective way to comprehend and get deeper information about user pains, opportunities and how to address them.

Working Together with Product Managers to Address Product Discovery Results