Simply Business Innovation, Technology & Agility

What practices does your team employ to foster innovation, and how have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?

In the dynamic realm of digital product innovation, particularly within the insurance sector, understanding the customer journey is paramount. At Simply Business, our customer lifecycle team has transcended data collection, transforming it into the foundation of our strategic advocacy for small businesses. We’re not just insuring small businesses; we’re building a dynamic, tech-driven ecosystem that fuels their growth. 

Our approach to discovery and innovation is grounded in a continuous stream of data deep dives with our analytical partners. Each reporting and analytics request is a targeted exploration, designed to extract actionable intelligence on customer pain points and behavioral patterns, allowing us to provide digital-first self-service support where and when our customers need it. The product team has weekly data review sessions, allowing us to rapidly iterate to enhance customer experience or lay the groundwork for innovative projects. We bring that data to collaborative sessions with product, analytics, customer experience and engineering to define our vision. By grounding our tech efforts in solid data around customer behavior, we’ve seen a boost in creative, out-of-the-box thinking. 

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

At Simply Business, we’ve learned that reliable innovation lies in de-risking assumptions through iterative prototyping rather than immediately pursuing complex, resource-intensive implementations. This approach allows us to validate the efficacy of potential solutions with minimal investment, ensuring we’re solving real problems and seeking validation from our customers along the way.

Instead of launching fully-fledged, feature-rich products, we prioritize “demand testing” through prototypes. This might involve A/B testing, “fake door” experiments to gauge interest or even manually-supported solutions that lay the groundwork for future AI automation. This strategy allows us to gather concrete user feedback and data, enabling us to refine our solutions before scaling them. Our focus on innovation has fostered a culture of continuous improvement, where we prioritize data-driven experimentation and customer-centric solutions. This has resulted in higher-quality work, increased efficiency and a more impactful customer experience.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture?

Before immersing myself in this data-driven product management approach, I wouldn’t have believed that data could be a powerful catalyst for team cohesion and enrichment. Yet our team’s relentless pursuit of innovation, fueled by high-velocity data analysis and collaborative opportunity mapping, has proven me wrong.

These sessions have established a predictable cadence of thought-provoking discussions that consistently yield unexpected insights. It’s become a dynamic, almost gamified process, where each team member is a detective, piecing together data clues to unlock the “next level” of customer understanding and solution development. The thrill of uncovering hidden patterns and identifying impactful opportunities has created a shared sense of purpose and excitement.

In essence, our focus on innovation has transformed our team into a highly collaborative, intellectually engaged and genuinely connected group. We’ve found that the pursuit of data-driven solutions is not just about building better products — it’s about building a better team.