Betterview

About The Company

Betterview is a Predictive Analytics Platform for properties. Property & Casualty (P&C) insurance companies rely on our predictive roof score to accelerate decisions and improve risk across their portfolio. As ‘the FICO score for properties,’ our goal is to help insurers automate processes using our roof score to ultimately better price and underwrite risk.

Our predictive roof score: To get to our score, we start with the most recent, highest res aerial image of a roof. Leveraging computer vision and deep learning, we’re able to diagnose the health of the roof, and in so doing, predict how likely that roof is to experience a loss. Using a customer's historic claims and loss data, we can calibrate our models and score to be predictive of future losses. Knowing our score has been calibrated to their book of business establishes trust among customers and ultimately helps encourage and drive automation across quoting, underwriting, and loss control.

Our customers: mid-market and large corporate insurance companies that underwrite commercial and/or residential properties. Ex: Nationwide, MunichRe, CinFin, Farmers, etc.

Our user base: consists of 3 tiers of decision-makers (1) leadership (head of underwriting), (2) innovation teams (responsible for proving out ROI for InsureTech partners), and (3) underwriters (everyday users).

Primary use cases: risk assessment, risk management, and risk improvement.

My role

As the Design Lead, I work closely with our co-founders, as well as the heads of engineering, data science, and customer success to define and implement strategic product initiatives that will push the company forward. It’s my job to design solutions that create immediate value for the user, and satisfy business goals and objectives.

Because we’re a very lean product team, my responsibilities as the sole designer are variable and vast: (1) collaborate with leadership to push the product forward, in a direction that aligns with the long-term vision; (2) advocate for a frictionless user experience, while considering technical limitations; (3) oversee the project management component of feature development; (4) maintain a cohesive visual and interactive experience across the platform; (5) advise on sales & marketing messaging and outreach.

My Approach: Leading design for an early-stage company with late-stage customers is an intense, high impact position. My strategy for promoting a user-centric approach is to keep 3 themes in mind: (1) acknowledge insurers’ current method for evaluating risk, (2) understand the deficiencies in that method, and (3) identify the pain points in daily execution.

As the liaison between the visionaries/strategists and the engineers/data scientists, I’ve found that when I keep these 3 themes in mind during design, there’s a ripple effect of shared understanding when the solution reaches the implementation phase. I’m more effective in communicating the user and business needs that are driving my solutions. Knowing the reason why a certain feature is needed, or the expected impact of a redesign, motivates and drives focus during development.

Project 1:

Property Profile

Goal of the project:

Our goal was to create a product that fits seamlessly into the underwriter workflow. It needed to be fast, accurate, and affordable at scale to elevate the types of policy decisions made, and provide confidence in managing risk.

Background:

In 2017 we noticed a gap in the InsureTech market. Underwriters were performing due diligence by pulling property data from various sources, sifting through and interpreting that info, and then drawing insights to come to a conclusion about the property condition. The problem with this approach is that it’s not fast, efficient, accurate, or scalable.

Big Qs to answer: What building and property data do underwriters consider valuable? How might we layer in imagery insights and regional weather risks to enhance the baseline property data? What type of distilled output or score would help underwriters make faster, more accurate decisions?

Evolution of the Product:

I was brought on in Fall 2017 to build out this product and bring it to market. V1 included a timeline to view current and historical imagery, minimal AI output to drive an A-F letter grade for the condition of the property, weather graph, and basic property information. We also had a dashboard that allowed customers to see an aggregate view of all properties in their portfolio. We went to market with v1 in Early Spring 2018, and continuously iterated to incorporate customer feedback in the form of smaller releases. The MVP version of the product was a success, resulting in customers putting the product to test through POC’s and eventually signing large annual contracts.

V3 - January 2019 (Copy)

V2 - Fall 2018 (Copy)

V1 - Spring 2018 (Copy)

V1 Dashboard - Spring 2018 (Copy)

This early success demonstrated strong market demand for this product offering and has caused us to shift our business model to focus our efforts primarily on this product. I recently redesigned the entire profile with the goal of (1) creating an actions system and (2) streamlining the data. Above the fold now features a new timeline design on the left-hand side and an expandable actions toolbar that’s fixed to the right-side of the screen. Below the fold puts more emphasis on the roof score and the common regional perils sections.

Project 2:

Property Profile Actions System

Goal of the project:

1. With thousands of Property Profiles, underwriters need a prioritization mechanism. Flag most urgent issues and categorize that property as “High Priority.”

2. Take risk management and improvement one step further. Use Visual Roof Detections to generate suggested Action Plans for a property.

3. Make additional tooling accessible: Measurement Tool, Comments, etc.