ProductStories #1 How we do product at Luko
NEW // The product team takes the mic 🎤
Here’s to Marion, our Head of Product
Dear all,
I’ve been in charge of Product at Luko for about a year. When I first joined, we had just started going into insurance. And our insurance subscription flow … just didn’t exist !
Luko has changed a lot since. We’ve conquered thousands of insurees and worked on really exciting projects with the team.
This episode is the first of a new series: ProductStories. The idea? Share our best practices, our questioning, and the outcome of our product projects (or the lack of ..!)
This time, I’d like to share a little bit about how we’ve built Product at Luko, as well as tell you about a few big projects we’ve been working on to date. (Upcoming articles will be shorter, promise :))
Please don’t hesitate to share with me all of your questions, ideas or feedback in comments or at marion@getluko.com
How we do Product at Luko
1. Our users are at the heart of our product (classic, right?)
We already shared a little bit of our vision in a Maddyness article last November: we care about placing the users at the core of our product. Inspired by WeChat’s Allen Zhang, we believe that “Only when we treat users with genuine empathy will our products be used for a longer time “ .
In that regard, we constantly reach out to our users when building the Luko product. We’ve done so when we started building our subscription flow, and we’re doing it again now that we’re testing out our new app. More on this in the next episode… :)
Between June and August 2018, we reached out to every single person on our insurance waiting list. Why? Because we wanted to gather their questions and their feedback regarding housing insurance, to make sure the product we had in mind would completely fit their needs. And to iterate on our first draft.
Doing so has enabled us to create a large community of people that we can still reach out to today, to get their feedback and their opinion on our upcoming product features. And our users love it: they’re glad to be part of the Luko adventure and to contribute to making insurance a little more modern and exciting.
And for us, it’s so valuable to have them integrated to our thought process from the start. Who’s best suited to talk about user experience… than a user ?
2. Every month : the Product Roadmap meeting (an institution !)
Every month, the whole team (yes, the whole team, and not just the head of X or the head of Y) gathers to discuss the product roadmap for the upcoming month. We’re 20 at Luko today, with 60% of the team focused on the technical part (hardware & coding) and the other 40% focused on growth/marketing/customer success.
How does that work ?
- The problem they’re trying to fix
- The impact of the project: how many users will be impacted, how much time this will save the operations team, how much money it’ll bring to Luko….
- The solution they’re thinking about
- On the day of the meeting: the person has 1 minute (sharp) to pitch their project to the team. Someone from the tech team jumps in right after to explain in 1 minute what this means in terms of technical complexity and dev time.
- Everyone then votes on the projects they think are the most relevant to Luko’s growth and should be developed first
- At the end of the meeting, we add up the votes and using a ratio business complexity/ technical difficulty, we end up having a roadmap for the following month that everyone has agreed on… in a fully democratic way! 🗳
Once they’ve done that work of clearly specifying what they have in mind, we work together with that person and Benoit, our CTO, to think about the solution that’s better suited to their needs — a mix between development complexity and the goal they’re trying to achieve.
It’s become a true institution at Luko, that brings the team closer together.
Everyone truly feels that they have a say in the future of Luko’s product, whichever role they have in the organization. This exercise also has a real pedagogic value: for the business team, it helps them understand better what’s happening behind the scenes…. And for the technical teams, they understand the value of the features they’re spending time on.
And it really helps me to say “ no “ when someone comes to me suggesting that we should develop something that’s not in the roadmap :)
3. Everyone is responsible for Customer Success
This is certainly not Luko’s own invention, but it’s definitely a key element of our company and product culture. Every member of the Luko team spends at least 2 hours a week on customer success. It helps us to stay close to the user, whose needs and expectations that change constantly.
During the first few months at Luko, our clients were digital natives, from the Parisian startup scene. But now our audience is much larger than that. So it’s really important that we stay in touch with our users to better understand their product issues and get the product to evolve in the way they expect it to.
Our main Product projects
1. Emma, our subscription person
Have you met… Emma?
Emma is the person that helps our users create their own insurance and gives them the right price based on their situation. We have the fastest insurance on-boarding flow in France: insured in 2 minutes! There’s not a lot of other insurance companies that enable users to get insured online without having to go through a physical agency or to having to call someone. Even less in such a short amount of time.
Emma has required a lot of work, patience and optimization. We’ve truly co-built it with our users community. We did have to call hundreds of users and iterate through the process hundreds of times, but it was definitely worth it. Tens of people get insured with Luko easily every day and Emma gets a lot of compliments. Those compliments are worth every single call we’ve made, and they encourage us to do even better!
Building and maintaining our subscription process is hard work. Every month, we improve the process. For example, recently, we added a way to bypass Google Maps in case a user’s address did not get recognized. We had to do so because many of our NVEI users (escooters) lived in places that Google did not know about. We also recently added the option to get a full recap (shareable with your friends, roommates and lovers) directly on our pricing page, to reassure users at the time they provide their paiement information. This has highly improved our conversion rate.
2. APIs for partners
Our APIs (application programming interfaces) enable our partners (insurance comparators, housing sites…) to get plugged to our subscription system. That way, they can distribute our insurance easily to their own users.
To be honest, this wasn’t something we thought we would need to build in the first months at Luko. We thought this would come later, when we’d be a slightly bigger company.
Yet, that’s what’s interesting when you build the product of a fast growing insurance company like Luko — with a 50% growth MoM. You need to be able to juggle between user-focused projects and growth-oriented projects so that everyone has their say and so that Luko can keep on having a healthy growth, while maintaining an optimal user experience.
Today, our APIs are performing really well and they do make a real difference on our numbers. Partly thanks to our amazing partners obviously :)
We’ve worked with the technical team to make sure our APIs are sufficiently flexible and dynamic so that we can easily build a new API when a new product becomes available, such as our insurance for new vehicles ( NVEI) or non-living owners ( PNO)
The simplified version of our API documentation is available on Postman.
3. The craze of electrical vehicles
The press is always talking about it: the e-scooters and other new transportation means of all kinds have blossomed in just a few months.
At the beginning, there was a complete gap from an insurance standpoint. No “ traditional “ insurance company offered a policy to protect drivers. Our insurees, keen on using those transportation modes, shared with us their fear of not being covered in case of an accident. So we decided that we should go and bridge that gap, to protect them.
This was a real challenge: releasing a brand new product to protect our e-scooters users. In the insurance world, releasing such a product can easily take a few months. Because our subscription process (Emma) was properly designed, it was fairly easy to duplicate it to adapt it to electrical vehicles. Just in time for Christmas and just a few weeks after we made the decision of bridging that gap, we managed to launch a brand new insurance and to be the first insurance company on the market to offer that kind of protection.
The perks of being a small team and having the flexibility to focus resources on a specific goal… and having clean code to easily replicate it !
Of course, all of this has come with experimenting… and learning a lot.
We’ve definitely made mistakes, as it’s normal to do some when releasing a product in such a short amount of time (and that product does not exist anywhere else).
At the beginning, for example, we asked our insurees to send us via email a photo of the serial number of their vehicle. But when we added the theft warrantee later on, we needed that number to be stored directly in our database, meaning we had to go back through that whole series of pictures that we’d received and manually enter those in our DB. We could have saved so much time asking our users to input their serial numbers in our product directly! But that’s also the way you learn and the way you get ideas to do better the next time round.
Here’s for a first tour of horizon of Product at Luko. Thanks for reading all the way !
What about next month?Next month, I’ll share a little more about the launch of our new mobile app, and our beta testers programs, with about 200 users in the past 3 months. More to come soon :)
Originally published at https://www.luko.eu on April 5, 2019.
