A messaging system with customizable notifications for brokers and underwriters.
*Some content has been redacted due to PII.
01 — Context
02 — Discovery
Quotes were stalling before submission because brokers and underwriters were communicating over email — answers got lost in threads, attachments missed approvals, and clarifying questions arrived hours (or days) after the underwriter had moved on.
I shadowed underwriters and brokers through six end-to-end quote cycles, timestamping every handoff. Roughly half the cycle time was spent waiting on a single back-and-forth message that had nothing to do with risk analysis — it was logistics.
03 — Problem & Alignment
Clients didn't know when underwriters needed something from them. Underwriters didn't know when clients had replied. Email's lack of structure was the silent tax on every quote.
With underwriting leadership and the platform team, we aligned on an in-product messaging system scoped per-quote — so every question, answer, and attachment lived on the quote it belonged to, and notifications could be tuned per role. Email would still go out, but as a pointer back to the source of truth, not the source of truth itself.
The hard requirement: underwriters had to be able to triage their inbox in under a minute at the start of the day.
04 — Strategy & Product Plan
Focused outcome: a per-quote messaging thread that both sides treat as the source of truth.
Target metrics: 2× time-to-revenue improvement, ≥90% of clarifications resolved in-product (not email), underwriter inbox triage ≤60 seconds.
Design plan:a threaded messaging panel docked to each quote, role-aware notification preferences (urgency, channel, digest cadence), templated quick-replies for the most common clarifications, and a read/unread model that respected the underwriter's focus state.
Feedback loops: bi-weekly usability sessions with 2 underwriters and 2 brokers, copy reviews with legal and compliance, instrumented launch with a kill-switch back to email-only for the first month.
05 — Takeaways & Outcomes
Shipped the messaging system across the quoting platform. Time-to-revenue improved 3× driven mostly by faster broker response, not faster underwriter throughput. The notification preferences pattern was later adopted by adjacent products.
Lesson: in B2B, "build messaging" isn't the work. The work is making the right person feel a gentle, well-timed nudge — and giving the other person confidence the nudge landed.