Boost
How Crafted Helped Boost Launch Their First User-Facing Application and Accelerate Sales Leads
Engagement Overview
Boost is a B2B2C digital insurance platform that enables insurance companies in any industry to build, embed, and manage insurance programs for their customers. Though they had helped leading brands provide over $65 billion of protection through their deep knowledge of insurance and platform API, Boost had never designed or built a front-end, user-facing application prior to 2021. Enter Crafted in January of 2021.
Founder and CEO Alex Maffeo and CTO Chris Vitone knew they needed to better educate prospective customers on the Boost platform and therefore accelerate leads through the sales pipeline. In order to achieve these goals, they needed external help with user experience design and front-end development. The executive team was drawn to Crafted’s iterative, user-centered design process and balanced team approach. Read on to learn how we helped Boost bring their first user-facing experience to market.
Goals
Initially, Boost sold a back-end API platform that insurance providers could integrate into their websites. The sales team spent countless sales calls educating unqualified leads on Boost’s offerings, wasting time and distracting them from more qualified opportunities. Chris and Alex recognized the need for a prospect-facing, self-service education platform, but needed the right team to design and build it. At the time, Boost had in-house developers and product managers, but no internal or external design.
Approach
In January 2021, Boost engaged Crafted. While both teams were aligned on engineering practices and employing a design-first approach, the Boost team had their reservations around ramp time, domain knowledge, and code quality. The Crafted team quickly assuaged those concerns by demonstrating close collaboration, thorough communication, and strong engineering practices.
Crafted used the Balanced Team approach, bringing together the expertise of a product manager, designer, and two engineers. The engagement was broken out into two distinct phases. During the discovery and validation phase, PM and design focused on iteratively designing and validating concepts with internal subject matter experts, stakeholders, and existing clients. The Crafted team conducted thorough competitive analysis and user research while keeping all team members on both sides closely aligned. During the iterative delivery phase, PM, design, and engineering further iterated on designs while also building the front-end application. Throughout the engagement, Crafted’s PMs and engineers paired with Boost’s existing PMs and engineers to stay closely aligned and share best practices across teams.
“Crafted brought in top-notch engineers that could take a problem, distill it into a solution, and make that solution a reality. They were in the development fold. They were part of our sprints and our regular communications.”
Outcomes
In just nine months, Crafted was able to build a lead-nurturing platform through which prospective customers could better understand and explore Boost’s insurance offerings, what is covered in each plan, and the associated costs. Being able to preview quotes to provide price transparency to customers was a key value driver.
The portal not only helped accelerate qualified leads through the sales funnel, but it also gave the Boost team the ability to measure user experiences against business metrics. The Crafted team built tight integrations between the front-end application and back-end tools—like Pendo and Hubspot—that measure customer behavior, driving insights to sales and product teams in realtime.
What the Boost Team Has to Say
A big piece of the Crafted team’s work with Boost was demonstrating and teaching best practices across the three disciplines. This was Boost’s first foray into user-experiences. Teaching them how we do Discovery and Validation through generative research, prototyping, and usability testing was incredibly enlightening for the Boost team and set the stage for how they engaged with future customers and leads.
“Crafted provided reachability, response, and planning. They were fully embedded with our customers, our engineers, and our PMs, which enabled us to build a better product.”
We built the app using modern practices that closely aligned with Boost’s engineering practices of test driven development and continuous integration & deployment. Our ability to balance our expertise with the existing domain knowledge at Boost helped the Crafted team and our work seamlessly integrate into their day-to-day.
“We had an old school waterfall mentality before Crafted came in. They introduced a modern development stack and helped us adapt to change.”
Lastly, a large chunk of the engagement took place during a peak period of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning a lot of meetings and working sessions were done fully remote. Crafted’s continuous collaboration and communication between Manhattan-based Boost and Denver-based Crafted employees helped keep key stakeholders aligned and the Balanced Team operating efficiently, driving the work forward.
“Crafted’s work was a great balance of business, product, and tech. We felt they all understood our goal and helped make it a reality, giving us a high-value return on our investment. We would—and will—hire them again because of how they engage the customer and deliver product.”
Curious how we can help your team ship high-quality products and learn best practices across product management, design, and engineering? Reach out now and we’d love to chat!
