Strategy Workshop
Design thinking to empower Stakeholders and influence strategy
Overview
As a company we wanted to enter into the Medicare Supplement marketplace. Part of that was through the acquisition of GoMedigap. After that acquisition we sought to incorporate their sales process within our tools, to capture and uncover that process along with my Product Manager at the time led a 2 day workshop to capture the selling process, as well as ideate on tools we could develop to improve that process.
My role in the project was as lead designer, facilitating the workshop alongside my partners in product as well as executing on the designs that we decided to explore.
Pre Workshop
I pulled from my previous experience running workshops and got clear alignment among the stakeholders what we wanted to learn. I then sent out a brief survey to all the agents to get a general idea of their current selling experience and what could be better. After getting that feedback I synthesized the responses to get an overview of what we knew about these users and behaviors.
I then partnered with my Product Managers to establish the process for the workshop, the schedule, and the activities we would do. While most times I like to follow Google’s Sprint we only had two days to complete our workshop. So my Product Manage and I established what we wanted to learn and put together some activities from my favorite book Gamestorming to have stakeholders complete.
The Workshop
Participants
Product Management, Design, Engineering, Sales, Sales Operations Manager
Warm Up
We did a quick warm up where the participants created a playing card (activity from Gamestorming) to share with the group. It included a self portrait, their nickname, and a fact that was unlikely to be known. We then had the participants trade the cards and ask a question about the card they received’s unknown fact and the person whose card it was would answer and share the card they had.
While not business related, this gets folks creative and engaged and helps build rapport.
Map the Flow
To map the current flow we split into three cross functional teams to represent agents, customers, and the underwriting team (inspired by Post the Path)
This was done using post it notes so we could easily move things around/add steps as needed.
We then used dot voting to indicate where the points in the process that were hard (red) and easy (green) from both the agent and customer perspective.
Crazy 8’s
Using the pain points identified from the previous session, we had the participants do a round of crazy 8’s, a core method of Google’s Design Sprint, to ideate on possible ideas to improve the flow.
We then all reviewed the ideas and dot voted on the ones we felt were worth exploring further.
For the ideas that held weight we then built out quick story board on the details of the ideas to develop them further.
Stack ranking
After we had generated the ideas, we sat as a team and cross functionally stack ranked them, including a ranking on the value to Agents, Customers, and the Business.
Outcomes
Several of the product ideas we had from the workshop went into iterative design & development phases. Here are some examples of the products we built using the strategy developed from this workshop.
After the workshop and through the course of 2020 we used the findings from this workshop to help us:
Develop and deliver a Medicare Supplement selling flow within our own software suite and retire Mediapp (2020)
Increase the sale of Medicare Supplement plans for eHealth and allow all agents to sell Medicare Supplement plans
Decrease agent sentiments that Medicare Supplement was too “hard” to sell
Create tools that were identified as needed within the workshop (Underwriting Tool, Declinable Drug Tool, Medicare Supplement Only Script)