Bestow Admin Portal

My Role

  • Product Strategy

  • Product Design Lead

  • User Testing

  • Prototyping

  • Wireframing, UX & Visual Design

Overview

The Bestow Admin Portal is where our customer success team can help policyholders manage their policies. When I joined Bestow, the portal was missing key information and features critical for our CX team to do their jobs. Over the past year, we’ve added a handful of new information and features which have freed us up to start thinking more strategically about where the tool needs to go in the future.

Note: Much of this work is still in progress. I’d love to share more upon request.

 

Some Outcomes I’m Proud Of

Over the year I’ve spent at Bestow, the team responsible for the admin portal has seen three different Product Managers and three different Engineering Leads. Despite the chaotic nature of turnover, the team was able to push towards some amazing outcomes. Here are a few that I’m proud of:

  1. Design <> CX Collaboration

  2. Putting people at the top-level instead of policies

  3. Driving the future of our roadmap

  4. Enabling the next designer to become a lead

 
Outcome #1

Design <> CX Collaboration

One of the biggest joys of building what may seem like a dry administrative tool is that our end users are also our coworkers. We had a wealth of user knowledge and insight working alongside us but we weren’t tapping in to this resource. In the past year, we’ve made CX input a first-class citizen, and have plans to do more along the way.

CX-collab.png 
Outcome #2

Putting people at the top-level instead of policies

For years, Bestow could only sell one policy per person (even if that coverage was terminated or hit its end date). This lead to our Admin Portal being optimized for our CX team to look up specific policies. There’s nothing terrible about this, but it could be better. At the end of the day, our CX team is working with a person, not a policy, and our tools & processes should focus on the customer on the other end of the line.

I am the sole designer in this effort, and I was the person to first raise the need to bring customers to our highest level of hierarchy. I also lead the charge in dreaming up the future vision and developing a phased approach.

We’re still in Phase 1 of this work, and so far I’ve been managing the collaboration of our front-end and back-end developers and product leads to see Phase 2 and beyond become a reality.

I’d be more than happy to share a larger case study on the product strategy effort, but in the meantime here is the documentation I put together surrounding this work. See a PDF of the Confluence page

Outcome #3

Driving the future of our roadmap

Because the team working on this tool changed leadership so often, I had the most historical context on the admin portal when it came to quarterly planning. I jumped in and facilitated a workshop that determined which features we’ll focus on in the next 6 months and helped us understand the ultimate vision for the future of our product.

Check out the Whimsical Board we used during the workshop 
Outcome #4

Enabling the next designer to become a lead

In my year at Bestow, I’ve become the Design lead for four different product teams. While I enjoy dreaming big in a lot of areas and learning deeply about our platform, it’s hardly a scalable solution to lead it all. Towards the beginning of 2021, I hired a Senior Designer with the ultimate goal of one day passing the torch.

Today we are working together to ensure he has the tools he needs to be successful on the team (mainly, context, confidence, and strategy skills). We’re both aligned on a stretch goal of him taking on a Design Lead role by the end of the year.