Spotlight on... Our Product Team

Article written by Charlotte Pearson

Our Product Team is a relatively new addition to The Floow focusing on new development and iterative updates to our product portfolio. The team includes many areas of The Floow’s business including Pricing and Actuarial, Product Management, Product Design and User Research.

Their role is to understand the market, client and user needs so we create products and solutions which fulfil these needs and provide value to our clients and end-users. Much of the Product Team’s work is focused on research to understand how users and clients actually use our products and ensure that we prioritise the most important updates and developments.

Our Product Team working collaboratively

Since formation, the team has spent time working with clients and multiple teams across the business to plan and shape our product roadmap, define product and research processes, and create a design system that helps us stay consistent and move fast when building new products. They have also created a structured product release process and built a cohesive vision for each of our products which informs its development and how we speak about it internally and externally.

We previously spoke to our Pricing and Actuarial experts, Andy Goldby and Jonathan Smith, in issue 3 of Driven, where they discussed their roles and how they add value to our clients’ propositions. In this piece, we will be focusing on the other areas of our Product Team’s work and their vision for the future of The Floow.

The Product Team’s Role and Vision

We spoke to Andrei Berechet, our Head of Product, to find out more about his past experience working in this area and to get his take on the Product Team’s role within The Floow as well as his vision for the future of the team and our products.

Andrei Berechet, Head of Product, The Floow

Andrei Berechet - Head of Product

Past experience

I come from an engineering background and I’ve been doing product management for the past 10 years. I got into product management because I realised that all the bits that I was responsible for were part of the bigger whole, which was the product. I also realised that most of the problems I was grappling with as an engineer were created by a fuzzy understanding of customer needs and aspirations.

I felt the need to dig deeper into what was driving and motivating customers so I could do a better job at building products which solve those needs. I have diverse product experience across multiple continents and industries, startups and large companies, but my sweet spot is in companies like The Floow, where I can directly affect the bottom line and help build the product organisation from the ground up.

Your role at The Floow

I run the Product and Design teams at The Floow and I am responsible for our portfolio of products. My main responsibilities revolve around creating a successful Product team that is equally focused on solving problems for our insurance clients and for drivers. I strive to design best in class product processes which support our business strategy and help teams across the business to understand client needs and business value, so they can respond with state of the art telematics products and services that are successful for us and our clients.

I am also responsible for setting the vision and strategy for our product portfolio and for the successful execution and delivery of these products. I partner closely with our clients, and our internal teams, to make sure that we’re constantly delivering value both internally and externally, and we’re attuned to our clients’ requests and market changes.

How does the work you and the Product team do benefit our clients and end-users?

Everything we do in the Product team is for the ultimate benefit of our clients and end-users (our drivers). As insurers and drivers have different goals, we always have to wear two hats when thinking about our customers. That sometimes can be contradictory and difficult to reflect in the final product, however in our strategy and planning we have clear goals set for both.

Our thinking always starts from the end-users and we work backwards from there when we build new products or improve existing ones. In most cases, we know that if we solve problems for our end-users, that in turn will solve problems for our clients, all of which positively impacts us as a business.

When we start a new project we spend a lot of time initially working to understand the problem. Our Product Owners are responsible for bringing the customer context into the teams and we have an outstanding research team that is always in contact with clients or end-users. They use the latest discovery and user research techniques to understand problems and unfold this understanding into the teams who then try to come up with the simplest possible solution.

How does your team’s work help legacy organisations prepare for the future of mobility?

The vast majority of our insurer clients are undergoing heir own digital transformation. They understand disruption forces well and they have a well thought out plan to move their business online and provide the best digital experience for their customers. The Floow’s role is to support our clients on this journey, and to help them be at the top of the industry through our constant innovation in the mobility space. Our approach has always been to offer maximum flexibility and support for our clients, whilst always pushing them to adopt new technologies and to think differently about existing ones. We’re a mobile-first company and our goal is to innovate as much as possible in this space so we can get to a point where the phone can successfully replace older telematics devices and reduce costs drastically, for both personal and commercial lines. I think we’ve successfully reached that point now, and our customers are reaping the benefits. We’re always staying ahead of industry trends and pushing boundaries with our scoring innovation, extensive data collection tools and behavioural conditioning and we always bring our clients with us on that journey.

What is the important focus for the Product team, and The Floow, over the next 12 months?

Both in the Product team and across the business, we will be focused on product-led growth and responding swiftly and strategically to the unprecedented changes that are happening across the globe. Our overall goal is to empower our customers to adapt to these changes as quickly as possible and give them the right tools to respond to changing driver needs. Here are a few strategic goals that we’ll be focusing on over the next 12 months:

• Integrate our products and components into services that provide our clients and prospects with end-to-end flexibility and capabilities when responding to market changes

• Continue to build on our device-agnostic approach and create advanced data ingestion and processing tools which strengthen our market differentiation even further

• Improve our proprietary risk scoring architecture to drive superior, industry-first pricing capabilities

• Expand our crash detection and FNOL proposition aiming to increase the savings value for our clients.

Ensuring Client Success and End-User Engagement

We also spoke to Steven Cheshire - Product Owner, Jowita Emberton - UX/UI Designer and John Heaton - User Experience Specialist from the Product team to find out more about their particular area of work and discover how it positively impacts our clients and end-users.

Describe your role in the Product Team

Steven Cheshire - Product Owner

Steven: I’m currently working as a Product Owner, which means something different in every company.I spend most of my time discussing priorities, making sure the outcomes we want are well defined and mobilising the development teams towards making some tricky decisions along the way.

Jowita Emberton - UI/UX Designer

Jowita: I’m a UX and UI designer, currently working on our FloowFleet product. I conduct research to better understand our end-users’ needs (both fleet managers and their drivers), mock-up ideas, validate them with participants, and create design solutions that are easy to use.

John Heaton - User Experience Specialist

John: I’m a User Experience Specialist and my role is to focus on the voice and needs of our end-users.

How does your role impact our products and benefit our clients and end-users?

Steven: It should mean that The Floow is delivering quality products and features that solve problems and create opportunities for our clients, by taking their opinions into consideration as part of the development process. For end-users, it ensures that they have a voice and are not overlooked by the needs of the client, since driver adoption is the main blocker for any telematics solution.

Jowita: Research helps everyone at The Floow understand our customers better and testing can help us to focus our time and efforts on the most important developments. The features which I help design allow our customers to achieve more value from our products.

John: The core of my role includes user research and product discovery to ensure that the end-to-end architecture of our product portfolio delivers a seamless, flowing and value adding user journey.

What is your key focus over the coming months?

Steven: From an operational point of view, I’m looking to bring more focus to the teams so we can continue to improve the quality of the product we’re delivering, whilst making the best possible working environment for our development teams. From a delivery point of view, I’m working on two initiatives, both of which are due to be launched this summer and which focus on developing our scoring capabilities even further.

Jowita: I want to make sure that our FloowFleet product works well on mobile devices. Our customers are often on the go and at times, they can only use their phones, so providing them with the ability to complete tasks on their phone would be a great help to them. It will take a lot of work to make a complex desktop app work well on smaller devices but it will be worth it, particularly for fleet managers.

John: I’ll be focused on delivering iterative improvements to our product suite, based on the feedback loop of end-user research.

How is your work helping our clients prepare for the future of mobility and drive end-to-end engagement?

Steven: The two initiatives I’m working on aim to open up our scoring expertise to more organisations. One will open up our platform to support any partner who is willing to integrate with us. Our main focus here surrounds creating a secure flow of data from OEMs to The Floow.

The other will allow traditional black box policyholders and their insurers to gain an understanding of how much smartphone distraction is affecting their driving.

Jowita: I always aim to make our products easier to use, reduce friction and make onboarding faster, as well as allowing users to use a greater range of devices in order to get more use out of the product.

John: A lot of my focus is currently on early stage product discovery. We have some really exciting stuff in the pipeline; focused on connecting with end-users by solving their real world challenges and needs.

What has been your proudest moment since joining The Floow?

Steven: Taking the step up to Product Owner was a big achievement for me as it allowed me to have more input into what we build and how we build it. There are other small wins as well, such as when clients adopt features/solutions that you’ve worked on and provide positive feedback.

Jowita: My proudest moment at The Floow was when- as a team - we found a more effective way of working together. We became much more transparent around what we do, agreed on our work priorities, and generally improved the way in which we communicate - allowing us to progress faster.

John Heaton: For me, it is being part of a super flexible team that ‘always finds a way’.