Manager Persona

 
 
 
 
 

- Approach & Process - 

 

- Empathize -

 

To start off the persona, what we know of the group so far is that these managers are found in the larger insurance agencies (sized A1 - A3) who use Vertafore Platform. These managers oversee teams of Account Managers or Customer Service Representatives (CSR)s within Personal and Commercial lines of business. These managers are not owners or executives. 

 

- Define -

 

Challenges: We will be developing future products that will fit this demographic, but there is currently no profile for this group.

Research Question: Who is the Manager persona and what is important to them in their daily work?

Research Goals: Identify their customer journey and uncover goals, pain points and challenges.

Business Goals: Creating a new Manager persona will give insight into this new audience. With a new group using the platform, we hope to increase platform adoption rates and license sales.

 

- Ideate -

Hypothesis

We had two thoughts around what a manager's day would be like and what they were looking for:

  • A manager's timeframe is not hour by hour but within 24 hour cyclical cycles.

  • Looking at resource management and allocation, how do they load balance and work within their team? Do they want to understand their team's strengths and weaknesses?

 

- Prototype & Test -

 

User Research

Several of my coworkers from the Experience Design team attended NetVu 2016, which was a perfect opportunity to conduct user research on various projects. (The Manager Persona project was one of them). They held sessions with conference participants who fit the Manager profile, utilizing the Design Thinking tool templates we had on hand (experience maps, empathy maps, task flows, storyboards). From these sessions our team garnered a lot of data. Along with another teammate back in the office, we analyzed the data and produced master maps to showcase the information.

 

Analysis

With my team of three group, we took the information from the master maps and charted out a 7 to 1 map to see if bigger patterns could be identified.

 

Insights

  • Main pain points: Managers spend most of their day troubleshooting issues and putting out fires. They do not have oversight into their team's work; as a result of this their team members feel unsupported and powerless to do anything.

  • Goals: They would rather devote more time to team development- mentoring and growing their team.

  • What they are looking for in new tools: Oversight, automating workflow reassignment, and empowering team members to help themselves. 

recommendations

From the results, we surmised that in order to solve the manager's pain points, they would need a two-part product. The first would be a dashboard that would monitor certain key performance indicators (KPIs) to see how their team was doing as a whole, with the ability to drill down to an individual team member. The second part would be a logic engine that would produce alerts to notify managers of current problems or more importantly, upcoming areas that could turn into potential issues.  

 
 

- DEFINE & IDEATE -

 

What we needed to validate at this point was:

Will the hypothesis of a two-part product solve the manager and the team's major pain points? If so, what is needed in this new product?

 

- Prototype & Test -

 

Secondary user research

Based on the analysis, I created three hypothetical user flows in power point, that featured the two product system:

  • What a manager's day would look like if they had a dashboard and logic engine system.

  • What a CSR's day would look like if they operated in the new system.

  • What a day would look like if CSRs had the ability to help out each other themselves by picking up project.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

In order to get an idea of what type of information the manager would like to see on the dashboard and for the logic engine, I created templates for testing to gather information on:

  • Alerts managers would like to see generated from the logic engine

  • A compliance report on which employees were completing their workflows correctly

  • A reassignment report on how many people were reassigning workflows

  • Team report (member name, compliance percentage, love metric average)

  • Individual report

  • Love metrics throughout the day (for CSRs)

Two members from the Team of Three group visited three East coast insurance agencies, (Ritz & Osburne, Dayton, Burns) to conduct a second round of user research. Their trips resulted in successfully validating our secondary hypothesis for what the manager and team needed to function more effectively. Since the managers tracked different KPIs at the different agencies, the idea of adding customization in this area along with the logic engine alerts would help create a powerful and useful two system dashboard product.

 

 

Final Deliverable for the manager persona

Using the information that was gathered and validated over the two user research sessions, I composed the profile for the new Manager Persona. The strong patterns that emerged in the research greatly helped form the persona's foundations and will prove to be a useful tool for future products.

 
 

Impact

This completed persona opened new areas for new features and products for this audience.

 

Next Steps

One of the items that came out of the research for the persona was a need for a two product system, (the dashboard and logic engine) for the managers. The project will be continued by creating a layout for the dashboard and refining the requirements for the logic engine with development and project management.