METROMILE

Try Before You Buy (2019-2020)

A player in the insuretech arena, Metromile offers compelling and competitive usage-based pricing for auto insurance, providing low to medium mileage drivers with quality services at significant cost savings. In 2019 growth was an important initiative for the company, with the gradual rollout of behaviour-based pricing in several states, key marketing hires and the formation of a Growth product team focused on the potential of the Metromile mobile app to engage and qualify prospective customers. From user research we understood that, in spite of the intended simplicity of Metromile's pay-per-mile pricing model, a basic question for many drivers considering switching was: "Can I save with Metromile?"

Metromile employs a telematics device, plugged into the car's OBD port, to assess monthly mileage thereby making that component of the monthly bill variable. For low mileage drivers the value proposition is very clear. For all drivers, in states where the use of telematics to monitor safe driving is permitted (it is not in California), Metromile can also reward safe drivers with additional discounts.

As the design lead for the Growth team, I organized and facilitated a "growth hacking" workshop that, in addition to producing a robust set of ideas and tactics, also provided a forum for socializing the growth problem space within the new team. Lowering the cost of customer acquisition was the primary metric for the team. Further, we knew from an analysis of discount potential for mid-mileage drivers, who might not naturally self-identify as benefitting from Metromile savings, that this group could be a significant addressable market.

Of thirteen ideas generated in the workshop, a round of voting reduced the number of viable growth tactics to six, which our group then plotted into a 2x2 effort-impact matrix.

Within this set were several ideas well-grounded in customer research and analytics. The Metromile Test Drive, while highest in effort level, would have the most impact while also building on a prior telematics-based product development program that had been beta-tested in the Metromile app. The "test drive" results can persuade unconvinced drivers to consider Metromile by seeing evidence of savings based on their actual driving.

In order to fully internalize Metromile's offering and value proposition, I embarked on a deep dive research round into:

• The insuretech market & players, considering Metromile vs. traditional models, and risk rating vs. usage-based insurance

  • Actuarial practice meets data science

  • Telematics: history and methods

• Understanding insurance consumers

  • In-house user research studies

  • Academic & industry sources

• Market segmentation

My team launched a series of experiments to test our way into this approach, building in React Native:

1. First, we wanted to measure prospects' willingness to grant permissions to the Metromile native app to collect motion activity data, putting iOS' ability to store and categorize motion activity to use to calculate a binary result in assessing a prospect's ability to save with Metromile.

2. This was not very accurate, with many going down the "no" path, so we followed up with a few questions to requalify prospects.

3. Next, we added a capability to scan the prospect's driver's license and retrieve records to pass into the web-based Quote & Enrollement (Q&E) flow.

4. Finally, we launched a painted door test to gauge interest in Test Drive participation.

As this test was running, I faciliated two design sprints back to back, for the Growth and Q&E teams, the latter planning on replatforming the quote flow and in the process minimizing the amount of information required from the prospect to get a quote. The Growth team sprint positioned the team to hit the ground running with Test Drive development in the new year.

My iterations through design were supported by user research; in early January I conducted a quick walkthrough with five users, as our researcher prepared both competitive research and a round of in-depth interviews.

For this effort, our team had decided not to use the telematics backend that Metromile had developed for Co-Pilot, but instead to integrate a more sophisticated third party solution. While that development was underway, as well as a formal filing with the Oregon Department of Insurance, I was the point person for coordinating marketing assets as well as co-writing the Test Drive FAQ with Metromile customer service.

The pilot launched on time on April 1, 2020, as captured in the video below. Test Drive continues to attract new customers as Metromile Ride Along.