Working for the UK’s largest online insurance brokers providing commercial insurance such as Landlord, Shop and Business Insurance Policies. The Executive teams (CEO, COO, CFO, CTO etc) were looking to increase their market share in the UK (they also have a US branch) by potentially looking at targeting the traditional market place of insurance, e.g High Street insurance brokers.

The C-Suite wanted to validate/invalidate the market opportunity, strategic solution and potential implementation following some external market research they had conducted.

My task was to facilitate the C-Suite’s desire to validate or invalidate the question of “How do we create a significant volume of customers in the UK from customers who would normally buy their insurance offline (High Street Broker, Bank etc).

I was given 5 full days of the C-Suite’s time to work towards testing this hypothesis.

Having utilised Jake Knapp’s Google Ventures Design Sprints before and had some great success, I realised that this technique could potentially help facilitate a desired outcome.

So for the next 5 days, I facilitated the process of GV’s Design Sprint, which looks something like this;

Monday (Mapping): The group works with experts from across the organisation to identify the ultimate goal of the sprint and map out the challenge for the week.

Tuesday (Sketching): The team starts exploring a variety of solutions by looking at sources of inspiration and sketching various approaches that they could take.

Wednesday (Decision Time): The group looks at the solutions explored on Tuesday and decides which ones have the best chance of fulfilling the target for the week. The team then expands those sketched solutions into storyboards.

Thursday (Prototype): The group turns the storyboards into a working prototype designed to mimic the final approach and have it ready for testing.

Friday (Test): The final prototype is shown to prospective users and its viability is tested.

Over the course of those 5 days we aimed to answer some more specific questions linked to our over arching question “How do we create a significant volume of customers in the UK from customers who would normally buy their insurance offline (High Street Broker, Bank etc).

These questions were;

– Can we change customers to change providers?

– Can we understand this group of customers needs?

– Can we replace the trust customers get from buying locally?

– Can we adapt our proposition to meet the demands of these customers?

– Can we sell this profitably?

– Can we get to the customer quick enough?

Using the method described as above, I was able to foster together a group of highly opinionated C-Level Execs, getting them to engage with the process for the full 5 days. This in itself is a major achievement and a testament to their investment into answering this question. It costs the organisation a lot (in terms of time cost, of these individuals).

We were able to reduce the business case decision timeframe from an average of 9 months to only 5 days using Google Ventures Design Sprints, this delivered value immediately. The ability to invalidate an existing hypothesis in days saved the company a potential waste of £millions and many months or years as would have been experienced through their traditional experimentation.

Going further than validating/invalidating the hypothesis, as part of the day of prototyping, we had arranged for some customer interviews. We used an external agency in conjunction with an in-house customer insights team to avoid biases and making sure that we targeted a customer segment that would provided valuable insight into the question we were trying to answer.

As a result the business were also able to redefine their understanding of their customer’s perceptions of them in the same 5 days. This will enable them to avoid misaligned future initiatives and missed opportunities.