The project

When a Fortune Global 500 Insurance company recognizes a need for internal change and looks for a partner to help them bring that change to life, the best companies in the world compete to be that partner. My company took a different approach to the traditional sales pitch. We spent 10 months preparing with a team of 150 subject matter experts from across our organization. We identified four areas of impact and created detailed plans for how we would improve those areas. I was brought on to help visualize how we would transform their claims management process.  An insurance claims manager helps his customers who are unable to work because of a sickness, injury, or pregnancy. I knew I wanted to take a human, experience-led approach, so I used conversational language and made the claimant the center of the whole experience. I led the design and development teams to deliver a fully functional MVP in just under 3 months. We worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week towards a shared goal, but it was the unanimous commitment to be human, both on our internal team and for the client and the client’s customers, that kept us persevering with vigor and wholeheartedness. I learned how to maintain calm leadership in a time of high stress and motivate my teams with kindness to deliver for a nearly-impossible deadline. 

My role

I worked as design lead to build a working claims management tool collaborating cross functionally with leadership and dev teams. I built a fully functioning MVP to show how we could help our prospective client redesign their claims management process. I designed features that demonstrated how we would speed up the claims management process using AI to extract key information from doctor-submitted medical records to auto-populate formfields, and how we would put the claimant at the heart of the product, eliminating the need to interface with a confusing portal, but instead to be able to communicate with a claims agent over text message. I was responsible for creating and delivering the working tool in time for our pitch, including tangentially managing our development team building it. I also took initiative to learn a new prototyping tool to create a back-up clickable prototype in case the code failed, which ended up saving us after a last-minute decision to pivot.    

The outcome

As the finale of our two-week long pitch, the tool I designed was presented on-stage as part of a live re-enactment of a future case scenario where an insurance agent guides a man named Jim through his back injury claim during the months it takes him to recover. The client was blown away how I redesigned their claims management process in an empathetic way. Being prepared and taking a human-centered approach helped us compete against several other top companies to win the deal - a 10-year USD $700 million contract: our biggest in history.