Contact
Team
Role
Product Design, Analysis, Strategic Synthesis, Interaction Design
Duration
4 months
December 2021 – March 2022
With competitors launching successful agent offerings, partners and agencies expressing interest, and a recent LIMRA report finding that 41% of consumers still prefer to buy life insurance through an agent, it was clear that Ladder needed an agent program
While I am tempted to outline every hiccup, detour, and challenge along the way, this case study will focus primarily on the key waypoints along the way.
This structure would inevitably become the three main sections of the Ladder for Agents program.
The goal was to build something lightweight to prove the value of the program.
Ladder's strategy was to sell to Platforms where one contract would give us access to a large group of agents.
The first deal was expected to bring in thousands of agents, with similar deals already in the pipeline.
By utilizing our pre-existing quote generator form, and repurposing our refer a friend links, I was able to put together a dashboard that could be launched quickly without much complexity, helping achieve constraint #1.
Without properly evaluating agents, Ladder could be at risk of paying bad actors for questionable behavior. Numerous discussions and debates were had with the legal and compliance teams to understand the agent landscape, potential risks, and ultimately determine a path forward. The end result is this beast of a flowchart (and no, I won't test you on the content here).
There were 3 categories of evidence we chose to pull (plus a few internal requirements for reporting purposes). Each had different sets of information required to make the pull.
In the interest of reducing friction and better supporting our users, I worked to understand if every data point was critical. By digging into the details of the data pulls, I was able to successfully eliminate the need for NPN (the agent's producer number), instead relying solely on SSN which was more versatile, and likely to be memorized.
Agents were entering nicknames, yet accurate data pulls require legal names, so we modified the form to specify as such. Next, we overhauled how we captured agency details, clarifying that it was a search (1), improving the ability to identify the right agency (2), and allowing new agencies to be added (3) rather than blocking the agents when their agency was not yet in our system.
This background check provider had a limited API, so the simplest option (which we launched with) was to have the service email the agent, and we'd simply tell them to check their inbox. Once the agent submitted the background check form, the credit portion would return almost instantly, but the criminal report would take 2-14 days to return.
This process led to most agents never opening the email from the provider, and those who did, often never returned to Ladder despite ultimately being approved. Our average approval time was about 2 weeks. Something had to be done.
With 3 out of 4 reports coming back instantly, I proposed to grant agents who pass those reports, full access to the dashboard. However we would withhold payout of commission until the criminal check was fully passed. After a conversation with the compliance team, they were onboard.
I also needed to streamline the handoff to the background check. I proposed we embed their application on Ladder via an iframe, which I successfully convinced our background check partner to allow us to do.
Now, with those two agreements in place, agents were now able to complete their entire application on the Ladder site.
This reduced the average wait time for most agents from 2 weeks, to now having instant access to the dashboard to begin their journey.
With that, we successfully achieved our goal, and launched a robust system to allow agents, to sign up, be evaluated, and sell Ladder policies.
While we may not have had thousands of agent sign ups after launch, in a matter of months we had hundreds of approved agents using the platform.
"Really impressed with the demo [animated dancing emoji]. You have gotten a ton done!"
– Ladder’s CTO
"I just saw your list of payment permutations. You are a king [flexing bicep emoji]!"
– Ladder’s Head of Product
"The dashboard is amazing. You got it."
– Ladder’s Head of Business
Development
Final screens
This is a video I concepted, wrote, designed, animated, and my wife even recorded the voice over.
