Covered wanted more quoting volume from mortgage servicers. The inherited roadmap assumed the answer was more functionality. Discovery showed the bigger opportunity was helping servicers identify homeowners likely to save on insurance.
Covered’s product had originally been built around mortgage originators, where insurance needed to be simple and unobtrusive during a home purchase. Mortgage servicers had a very different problem set—and they were splitting volume across multiple insurance partners.
The business goal was straightforward: win a larger share of that volume. The open question was what product would actually make Covered materially more valuable to servicers.
Rather than continue executing an inherited roadmap, I pushed the team toward direct discovery with mortgage-servicer stakeholders. That work surfaced a higher-value problem: insurance affordability.
Rising premiums were creating customer frustration and call-center costs for servicers. Passive renewal behavior could also lead to forced-place insurance and additional regulatory scrutiny. The opportunity was not simply a richer quoting flow; it was helping servicers proactively identify customers who were likely to save before renewal.
Covered had years of proprietary nationwide insurance-quoting data. I partnered with data science to frame a predictive product that used that history to estimate which homeowners were likely to save by switching insurers—without incurring the cost and carrier burden of live-quoting every customer.
I helped define the business problem, initial model inputs and data-manipulation requirements, and the confidence standards needed for the output to be actionable.
We deprioritized an in-house policy-retrieval and upload experience. Although more detailed policy data sounded valuable, it did not create enough predictive advantage to justify the additional user friction and complexity.
That decision freed the team to focus on the part of the experience with greater customer and business leverage.
The resulting product increased legitimate quote volume by approximately 40% and produced approximately 20% policy conversion for mature cohorts. Covered’s largest mortgage-servicer partner expanded data sharing, and the team built a backlog of more than six additional prospective servicer partners.
I work with early-stage teams that need senior product leadership without a full-time hire.