Launching an innovative first of its kind digital life insurance product
Operating with a 0-to-1 startup mindset in a corporate environment
The product, "Premier Benefit IUL" was designed to disrupt the market
John Hancock set out to pioneer a new market by launching an innovative workplace life insurance benefit for employees and executives.
My role
As the design partner on the core team, I helped drive a startup-style approach using lean UX principles that brought the product to market in just 10 months.
Envisioning the the experience
I led the initiative by aligning the team around a shared vision of the product experience, using a journey map with storyboarding and color-coding to illustrate interactions between internal and external users.
Testing prototypes early
To validate our vision and approach, I created a mid-fidelity prototype of the experience and tested it with external sales & distribution partners. This enabled early pivots and iterations, ensuring a streamlined experience aligned with user needs and mental models.
Facilitating collaborative stakeholder workshops
I led cross-functional workshops to align stakeholders on the full customer experience, using a "people, platforms, connections" framework to map deliverables and communication touchpoints.
Building on this, I facilitated co-design sessions with product owners and IT architects to connect front-end journeys to back-end systems, define technical requirements, and set the foundation for scalable service delivery.
“Ipsita is grounded and organized, and even more rare, very rarely flustered. We know we can count on her to assess what is needed and figure out how to make it happen. She is a huge connector for HCD and their various partners and stakeholders."
Rachel Cohen
Lead Product Owner for New Digital Product Launch
Thank you so much for the time and effort you put into preparing for and facilitating the workshops. By bringing everyone together in one room we were able to make enormous progress towards tying up loose ends but also explore new avenues and opportunities for improving the customer experience. Your thoughtful structure enabled valuable conversations across value stream and helped connect dots that may have gone unnoticed.
Lynda Banerjee
Marketing Director
Co-designing the innovative self-service application
The success of this employee life insurance benefit relied on a simple, self-service application—no easy feat for complex life insurance.
Collaborating with actuarial and legal teams, we streamlined the process to make it easy, accessible, and user-friendly.
By leveraging design system components and simplifying content, I ensured a seamless experience that aligned with the platform’s architecture and usability standards.
Driving prioritization using UX research insights
Before launch, I conducted user testing on high-fidelity interactive prototypes with a diverse set of users to ensure basic usability and accessibility standards were prioritized and built for the MVP launch.
Using these insights, I led a prioritization workshop to implement key iterations pre-launch while mapping others to the post-launch roadmap, ranked by confidence and risk.
Thank you so much for pulling together and organizing all of our information around the customer journey vision and prototyping efforts! You have brought order to chaos in a very short time frame, and everyone we share the information with is blown away by the results thus far and can't wait to see how we translate this to a finished product.
Thank you again for helping us move this effort forward and show the teams the power of HCD input and the benefits of putting the customer at the center of all that we do!
Christopher Lintecum
VP Digital Operations & New Business
“Ipsita is a great designer, communicator, collaborator, and critical thinker. I’ve had the pleasure of working hand-in-hand with her and have learned so much from her as an HCD practitioner and designer. Her work is always thorough, thoughtful, and guided by strong HCD instincts and skills.”
Liana Nguyen
IT Lead & Full-stack Developer for New Product Launch
Leading with design to drive measurable impact
Launching this product led to the creation of a new digital education and self-service insurance application experience—a first for the business.
This new capability allowed our team to track key user and business metrics, optimize the experience based on real insights, and prove which design decisions delivered the most value.
Successful strategies could then be reused and scaled across other products.
Selected Works
Curious to go deeper? Inspired by something you saw?
Whether you have a collaboration in mind, are seeking mentorship, or just want to chat about design, I believe in the magic of human conversation.
Let’s grow, learn, and imagine what’s possible—together :)
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