The Insurance Onboarding Series

Aside from a few gleaming examples, insurance is one of the few purchases in life that still feels deeply cold and scammy, and invisibly steers where we live, what we build, how we drive, where we seek medical care, and more.

When I was nine years old, my little sister was born with special needs. I quickly learned via snippets of overheard conversation that my family’s health insurer, Fortis, was wildly raising our premiums in an attempt to get disabled people like my sister off of their plan. I didn’t really understand what insurance was, but I knew it was cruel, expensive, and a huge source of fear and stress.

Managing coverage, Medicaid, approvals, billing, and claims took eons of my Mom’s time throughout my childhood, and forced my parents to make impossible decisions about the cost of my sister’s doctor-recommended care. 

I studied design in college with an interest in fixing things, and especially the banks, insurers, and medical systems that had most impacted my family. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, I was able to move to Silicon Valley and pursue startup dreams while staying on my Mom’s health insurance plan through a phase of my life I almost certainly would have gone without coverage. (The ACA also prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in access to covered health programs. Take that, Fortis.)

When Amino extended me a job offer to design a better, in-network doctor, specialist, and surgeon-finding tool for Americans, it was an easy yes. But when Vouch called about joining as their first hire to redesign insurance from the ground up, I knew it was my chance to turn this childhood monster inside out.

American insurance is a shitshow, and evaluating design and product roles across insurtech can be daunting. How do you choose a place to apply when you’re not even sure how insurance works? How do you make it through an interview process when you’re still on your folks health plan, and the only coverage you’ve ever bought is AppleCare? I get it. It’s much easier to stay in industries without regulators, and spaces where “it depends” is not the answer to most questions.

But the founders insuring their startups, caregivers managing the health insurance of their kids and aging parents (almost always women), the driver that had a car accident but will lose their job if they can’t get to work - they all need your help. 

When you get hired in a new company, they typically walk you through an onboarding process meant to explain their industry, their product or service, their average customer, how the team is organized, and more.

For designers and product people, this onboarding also serves to teach how the customer-facing pieces of insurance work. That’s gonna be my focus for the next several posts.I want to help break down the barriers around this industry, and highlight a few lessons I learned along the way. The analogies that helped make it make sense. The misunderstandings and mistakes that slowed me down.

And I hope that other folks in insurtech tell me where I’ve got it wrong. Fill in the gaps! Write your own part of the onboarding series! We all got involved in this “boring” broken industry for our own reasons, but I think we can agree that it’s not getting better fast enough.

Let’s turn the monster inside out. 💪