Tech in the life and annuity insurance industry is old and slow. Dozens of tangled legacy systems make even basic operations difficult. Enter Zinnia Live, a unified hub built to streamline operations and empower carrier teams, agents, and customers.

A small sample of the legacy systems Zinnia Live will replace and unify

ProblemDespite the clear value proposition, Zinnia’s product teams lacked a tangible North Star, leading to team misalignments, experience fragmentation, and a haphazard roadmap.

ApproachI led an effort to step back and think years, rather than sprints, ahead. By digging deep with folks from call center ops to Zinnia’s CPO, I developed a holistic view of the opportunity: core use-cases, key differentiators, and critical business outcomes.

Re-thinking core structures
Originally, Zinnia Live's IA and features were split into two siloes: Policy Management and Case Management. While initially convenient, this structure perpetuated the fragmentation of the underlying legacy systems and made it difficult for Zinnia Live users to gain critical context.

I laid out the real-world relationship between these elements, the impact of fragmentation on operational efficiency, and a path toward a more unified experience.

Customer and policy data were siloed from cases and tasks, fragmenting critical context and slowing down users.

Unifying the Policies and Cases would require a fundamental restructure of the IA and navigation

Fitting the pieces together The concept of a unified hub was compelling, but the reality of fitting all this data into a single view without becoming unusable required careful exploration and iteration.

Speaking directly with users and target customers helped us hone in on the most urgent user needs:

By keeping these critical needs front-and-center, we created a logical hierarchy that prioritizes urgency while revealing context and uses progressive disclosure to let users dig deep on items of interest.

Care for the detailsOur operations teams are incredibly detail-oriented. Getting effective feedback and buy-in from them required mockups and prototypes that accurately reflected the reality of their work.

For example, business rules for team SLAs are nuanced and complex, allowing for pauses and resets under certain conditions. Today, that data is hidden away as raw timestamps in massive spreadsheets.

By representing that same data with appropriate context, we were able to surface urgency directly to front-line operatives.

A simple timer pattern for SLAs drew literal gasps from some operatives who had never seen it represented clearly.

Prototyping early and oftenMany Zinnia Live users are evaluated based on their accuracy and speed. I explored patterns such as bulk selection and a Command Palette to demonstrate how simple but effective UI patterns could save them time on frequent tasks.

When communicating future-state concepts, I prefer to move into prototypes as quickly as possible, using whichever tool will help me explore and communicate most effectively. I like Figma for lightweight interactions such as bulk selection. For more complex use-cases, like the Command Palette, I prefer to jump directly into code.

This quick Figma demo shows that 'manual' task assignment doesn't need to be tedious or painful.

I coded up a Command Palette prototype and shared a walkthrough in Slack for feedback. (I had a cold, so my voice is a bit rough. You can actually hear me hit puberty at 00:37.)

Paving the road aheadZinnia Live is an exciting, ambitious product and will require significant investment and resources in the years ahead to reach its full potential. This vision work has made that future tangible and has empowered our teams to move with renewed speed and alignment to make it a reality.