Symetra insurance
Reframing Customer Strategy for a Traditional Insurer
Symetra wanted to move beyond incremental improvements and rethink how it served customers. Partnering closely with the Engagement Lead, I helped define a customer-centered strategy that aligned key stakeholders - establishing the foundation for future digital experiences and ultimately Symetra's first direct-to-consumer term life offering.
Role
Senior Service & Interaction Designer, Fjord
scope
Customer Strategy • Service Design • Experience Vision • Product Strategy
team
Executive Leadership • Product • Marketing • Technology • Research
impact
Established the customer strategy that informed future initiatives, including Symetra's first direct-to-consumer insurance offering.
Transforming an Insurance Business
Symetra had built a successful business around financial advisors, but changing customer expectations and digital-first competitors were reshaping the insurance industry. The company recognized that improving individual touchpoints wasn't enough—it needed a new strategy for understanding customers and identifying where digital experiences could create meaningful value.
Rather than redesigning an existing product, our team was asked to help establish a customer-centered vision that could guide future products, services, and investment decisions. We set out to answer a larger strategic question:
How might a traditional insurance company organize around customer needs instead of internal products?
Business Challenge
Like many established financial institutions, Symetra's experiences reflected its internal organizational structure. Customers moved across disconnected products, channels, and teams, creating friction throughout their journey.
The challenge wasn't simply improving usability - it was creating alignment across multiple business units around a common understanding of customer needs, opportunities, and priorities.
Our goal was to establish a customer-centered strategy that could guide product decisions long after the engagement ended.
Challenging Traditional Assumptions
We conducted qualitative research across multiple customer segments to understand not only what customers were doing, but why they made decisions, where uncertainty emerged, and how trust was built throughout the insurance journey.
Instead of producing research artifacts for their own sake, we synthesized patterns that leadership could use to prioritize investments and identify opportunities for differentiation.
More importantly, it challenged the organization's long-held assumptions about how customers should be understood in the first place.
Reframing the Customer
Traditional customer segmentation grouped people by demographics, financial products, or life stage.
Our research suggested a different approach.
Rather than organizing around who customers were, we focused on how they thought, what motivated them, and how they approached major financial decisions.
Replacing demographic segmentation with customer mindsets gave the organization a shared language for understanding customer behavior and evaluating future opportunities across marketing, product, technology, and leadership.
The Customer Mindset Framework
Defining the axis
From our 7 research themes, the mindsets that emerged were grounded in two core needs.
The financial wellness mindsets
4 mindsets span the axis, each with their unique attitudes and behaviors.
Most of our client's products as designed, appeal to certain mindsets. The key question was "Is there an opportunity to expand?" The answer was yes.
In order to expand, it is vital to address "how do we meet people wherever they are, in whichever mindset they’re in?"
Replacing demographic segmentation with customer mindsets transformed how Symetra understood its customers—and became the foundation for every strategic decision that followed.
Creating Alignment Through Co-Creation
Research alone doesn't transform organizations.
To ensure the customer mindset framework influenced future decisions, we brought executives, product managers, marketers, and technology leaders together in a series of collaborative workshops.
Using the customer mindsets as a shared language, stakeholders collectively translated customer mindsets into strategic priorities for the business, challenged assumptions, and identified where Symetra could create the greatest value for its customers.
Rather than presenting recommendations to the organization, we created them with the organization - building alignment before defining strategic priorities.
Strategic Opportunity Areas
Research only creates value when it changes what an organization chooses to build.
Using the customer mindset framework and insights generated during our co-creation workshop, we translated customer needs into a set of strategic opportunity areas. Rather than prescribing individual features, these recommendations identified where Symetra could create the greatest long-term value by rethinking key moments in the customer journey, expanding its role beyond traditional insurance products, and developing new services that better reflected customers' financial lives.
Instead, we identified enduring opportunity spaces that could guide future products, services, and business decisions. These strategic opportunity areas became investment priorities rather than feature requests. They helped leadership evaluate future initiatives through the lens of customer value, ensuring subsequent product concepts reflected customer needs instead of existing organizational structures or assumptions.
Determining the right recommendation
Based on the observations gathered in the research —the goal posts keep changing, live in the moment or long-term, no judgment, varying levels of trust and understanding — a big insight was to transition from asking customers to adapt to the client to asking the client to adapt to its customers.
Thus, meeting people where they are is at the core of being customer-centric.
Bringing the Strategy to Life
Strategic recommendations only create value when people can envision what they look like in practice.
To demonstrate how the opportunity areas could reshape the customer experience, we translated our recommendations into a series of future-state customer journeys. Rather than designing individual features, the journey illustrated how Symetra could better support customers during the moments that mattered most.
To move beyond vision alone, we also organized these concepts into a phased roadmap, giving leadership a practical framework for sequencing investments and evolving the customer experience over time.
Together, the future-state customer journey and roadmap translated the strategic opportunity areas into future-state experience concepts
Outcomes
Establishing a Customer-Centered Foundation
The engagement changed more than Symetra's digital experiences - it changed how the organization understood customers and evaluated future opportunities.
Rather than measuring success by individual interface improvements, the engagement changed how Symetra approached customer experience.
The project resulted in:
- A shared customer-centered vision across multiple business functions
- Strategic alignment around customer priorities
- A roadmap for future digital investments
- Reusable design principles for subsequent initiatives
- The foundation for Symetra's first direct-to-consumer term life insurance offering
From Strategy to Product
Customer strategy only creates value when it changes what an organization builds.
Building on the mindset framework, strategic opportunity areas, journey maps, and experience principles established during this engagement, I partnered with the team to define Symetra's first direct-to-consumer life insurance concept.
The project translated customer strategy into a tangible product vision, exploring how people could discover, understand, and purchase life insurance without relying on the traditional advisor model.
Reflections...
This project fundamentally changed how I think about customer strategy.
Research wasn't the most valuable deliverable. The mindset framework was.
By giving the organization a new way to understand customers, research became a catalyst for alignment rather than a collection of insights. Once leaders shared the same mental model, strategic decisions became easier, priorities became clearer, and customer needs—not organizational structures—began guiding future investments.
That lesson has shaped every transformation project I've worked on since: meaningful product strategy starts by changing how organizations think before changing what they build.
Til next time,
Let's build something meaningful.
If you're tackling a complex product or building something from the ground up, I'd love to hear about it.