Beyond Shipping Insurance: Building Better Products by Delivering Seamless Experiences
Chapter 2: - Data-Driven Decisions: How Anansi unlocks product evolution by JP O’Hara
Welcome back to my series on building products at Anansi.
As we mentioned last time, we’re not just about delivering shipping insurance. In Marty Cagan's paraphrased words, “We’re here to solve difficult and real problems for our customers.” Ultimately, our solution needs to remove the headaches of lost and damaged parcels for retailers, logistic providers and couriers by turning complex issues into seamless experiences. To do this, we rely on three key Product pillars: empowered teams, customer-centricity, and data-driven decisions. Last time, we explored customer centricity which you can catch up on here.
Today we’re diving into Data Driven Decisions.
Data is what fuels everything we do at Anansi but we've prioritised quality over quantity
It’s not just about tracking metrics for the sake of it—it’s about uncovering the root causes of problems so we can solve them in creative, scalable ways. We constantly ask ourselves: What do the numbers say about what our customers really need? What patterns are emerging that we can turn into opportunities?
And while great companies start with data, that doesn’t mean we all have the same experience. In my opinion, working with data in the B2B space is very different from the B2C space.
Stating the obvious, but we have far less actual users so behavioural data - and even quant data in general - isn't as powerful. We're set up with a few tools that monitor behaviour and give us insights into how our products are used and how our users interact with them but so far we've mostly really used this type of data to focus on ensuring we have quality user experiences rather than looking for innovation. I think this will change as we look to add more products into the Anansi estate.
As we have fewer clients it has allowed us to become closer to them - both in terms of frequent communication (without being overbearing) and in terms of personal relationships. We've learnt what motivates our customers as companies but we've also learnt what the individuals at those companies want too. There's a sort of grey-area between the B2B customer feedback loop and the B2C feedback loop where we recognise we're building for businesses but it's not the whole business that uses our products - it's a handful of individuals.
In general, our most powerful data set so far has been understanding client needs and the problems they face and then solving those problems in a way that aligns to our general business strategy. It's still early days, so I'd love to sit here and say we sit on mountains of customer data but the reality is we don't, so we've prioritised quality over quantity.
Prioritising customer data over KPIs to help us build a better product
A few months ago we identified a few KPIs that we planned on using to help drive and align prioritisation of our product roadmap. And while KPIs can be a great method to drive results, for us at this stage of our evolution, we eventually found ourselves just going through the motions. And worse, as our priorities as a business were rapidly changing as we got closer to market fit, we were actually playing catch up with our KPIs - essentially letting the tail wag the dog.
So we dropped them (for now).
Our main target is growth and as I mentioned before, the nature of our business is that our early growth targets could be achieved with just a few customers. So instead of using KPIs to drive priorities, we’ve focussed on customer feedback and innovation to drive us instead.
If we had hundreds of users, tools like NPS or numbered scoring would be a great way for us to understand the success of our products but the reality is, like many other startups at our stage, we don't.
That's why we've been pragmatic and moved away from numbered success metrics and rely more on verbal or 'personal' success metrics. As an insurance company, of course we have to monitor claim volumes, claim success rates, inbound failure demand (of which there is almost none) and loss ratio but these are metrics you'd expect to see at any and every insurance provider.
Claim payout rate or decline percentage can be great ways to ensure your insurance products are actually meeting the needs of your customers but that's basic. We want our customers to love our products so we have to lean on direct feedback and treat our customers as real people with real problems rather than just numbers.
Has direct feedback and data-driven insights created breakthroughs in our product strategy?
I think the most obvious pivot, which was a direct cause of looking at the data and that direct feedback data input, was the move away from self-service onboarding. When Anansi first started, we offered a way for customers (via Shopify, for example) to join Anansi and insure their products without needing to contact us - they could do it all online. (And they still can!)
But we were spending lots of valuable time and resources monitoring the use of our online onboarding journey and redesigning, tweaking and experimenting. But the challenge was we weren't getting anywhere near enough traffic to be making confident decisions - "Did this experiment succeed? No idea."
In an attempt to better understand what customers wanted we started doing the 'onboarding' (our phrase for sign up and purchase) manually. We would work directly with customers and set them up ourselves and provide them with all the information they needed either face to face, virtual calls or even emails.
What did we find?
We found that customers on the whole actually just preferred us setting them up for them. It didn't take much time, it was easy for them and it gave us a chance to get to know them.
Arguably, this could allude to there being deeper issues in the online onboarding experience but considering it was something we could manage easily and it was something customers preferred, what did it matter? So we pivoted our strategy away from increasing traffic and maximising conversion of online sales and were able to use that time elsewhere - in this case, improving our core service in courier and shipment traffic improving the accuracy of our tracking data.
Not a typical answer about using data - but an example of how even the pursuit of more data and insights can lead to unexpected results. Sometimes, the absence of any data is at least knowledge or insight in itself.
In summary;
Typical for a B2B startup at our stage, we just don't have the mass volume of data we wish we had at Anansi, yet. And as a PM it's been an adjustment for sure. We just need to keep making sure we find the right balance between working hard to get the data and still moving the product forward. I’m honoured to say that from our customer feedback, I know we’re living up to our commitments and expectations. Seeing the strides taken in our product evolution has been personally and professionally satisfying. And while I can’t share the whole roadmap here, I’m excited for where we are heading.
I’d love to hear from anyone struggling with similar challenges and opportunities - make sure you reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Next time, we’ll dive into our next pillar - Empowering your Team. This final pillar is incredibly important for me, and I look forward to sharing how we do this at Anansi.
Follow Anansi on LinkedIn to keep in touch with how we’re doing!
