The Archipelago platform
Understand your building data, get better insurance
I started & helped grow the design team, & was the sole or lead designer on almost every major project for the company's first 4 years.
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Archipelago provides an online platform for commercial real estate insurance, which serves both owners & insurers. Owners can record hundreds of data points on each of thousands of buildings, and insurers can trust the data due to evidentiary documents.
I started & helped grow the design team, & was involved in almost every major project for the company's first 4 years. I'd like to highlight a couple that I'm especially proud of:
Click the image above to embiggen & see notes.
Initial product launch
Project brief: Archipelago's founders had pitched investors on a concept; now turn that into working software. Critically, our pilot customer had a go-live date that could not be moved, which was a make-or-break event for Archipelago.
My role: I transformed their vision into an MVP design. I held frequent meetings with Archipelago executives & flagship customers to understand the problem space and iterate on product directions. I was the sole designer at the company for the initial phase of this project, with a second designer joining partway through.
Outcome: A successful launch! The customer's go-live date went smoothly, and resulted in ~90% of potential insurer customers being introduced to Archipelago.
We solicited feedback from our pilot customer, which was uniformly positive. They were receiving praise from insurers for making their data understandable & trustable, with specific notes given for how easy the Archipelago platform was to navigate.
In addition, those insurers reached out directly to Archipelago, which led to signing deals with 2 of the largest insurers in the world over the following year.
Click the image above to embiggen & see notes.
Editing
Project brief: Enable customers to directly edit their own data. (Prior to this, all data management was done through our internal tooling.)
My role: I was the sole designer (and sometimes PM!) on this project. I first gathered requirements from internal experts & customers, then identified a long-term vision & the shorter-term MVP.
Focused on the MVP scope, I outlined a workflow that would integrate with our existing infrastructure. I designed the accompanying interfaces & validated with customers. Finally, I worked closely with engineering to adjust designs to work with limited development bandwidth.
Outcome: We deployed an MVP editing capability, which allowed customers to self-serve their most common use cases, an estimated 20% of all edits. This both reduced the workload on our internal data management team, and unblocked 10 sales motions.
Since I had designed the MVP with the longer-term vision in mind, the implementation was built to be forward-compatible, reducing the time for the upgrades shipped over the following year.
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