Ready for market in just 12 weeks?

Simply more service: Insurance customers should be able to access tradespeople from the Provinzial Rheinland network even when they aren’t filing a claim. After all, good tradespeople are hard to come by. Following a successful concierge pilot, the idea needed to be implemented digitally, in a scalable way, and, above all, quickly.

Tailored to the insurance company Provinzial Rheinland, we applied the Product Sprint Framework developed with codecentric. The Product Sprint consists of three phases: Design Sprint, Implementation Phase, and Validation Phase.

The idea is a hit: The platform for connecting customers with tradespeople is live, delighting customers, and undergoing continuous development and expansion. In 2020, it was named “Brand Experience of the Year” at the German Brand Award.

To lay a solid foundation, a key prerequisite for the Product Sprint framework, we began with a Design Sprint. Together with stakeholders from Provinzial Rheinland, developers from codecentric, and our UX/UI experts, we set out to better understand the problem and to develop and scrutinize a shared solution.

After defining the scope of functionality, we began the essential preparations for development in the first week of the implementation phase.

In addition to the technical setup in the AWS cloud, we established a pattern library, developed an information architecture, and designed the first user interfaces as wireframes. We also defined the backlog, prioritized and tailored to the short development timeframe.

The weeks that followed were devoted entirely to implementation, but not behind closed doors; rather, the process was closely coordinated with the client through the Product Owner we provided. To ensure that all activities remained aligned with user needs even during implementation, we strategically conducted supporting user interviews and surveys and reconciled the results with Provinzial Rheinland’s industry expertise.

During the final phase of the Product Sprint, we validated the next steps with the help of potential end users. To do this, we asked ourselves the following questions: Should we move forward, or do we need to take a step back and pivot? Were the goals achieved, and were the questions that were open at the beginning answered?

To gather the most honest feedback possible, we tested the product in its intended context: We surveyed a large group of tradespeople and customers and conducted a two-week diary study with them, followed by qualitative interviews.

Not all of the unique selling points we had assumed actually turned out to be such. Nevertheless, the result was very satisfactory for everyone involved. No critical usability hurdles stood in the way of the go-live.