Vlad Malik | Full-Stack Product Designer
Leading Design at Relay
- Insurance SaaS
- 3-Sided Deals: B2B2B
- 2 Designers Hired
- 3 Squads (30+ Engineers)
My Impact on Business
I joined in 2019 as Founding Product Designer (employee #5), before we had a product. My research, design, and voice in the company played an important role in our success.
Vlad's focus on jobs-to-be-done and meeting users where they were at was a huge part of how we made it as far as we did... He helped establish a company culture that was deeply focused on the end user.
- Relay Head of Technology (Source: LinkedIn)
Design Beyond Pixels
I designed and shipped our Reinsurance, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Cyber Insurance products. I cultivated partnerships with Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, and Product to influence broader factors that impact UX.
Examples of Features I Shipped
Insurance brokers used Relay to connect with wholesalers and insurers. My solutions streamlined their submission workflow and enabled them to manage quotes and generate client proposals at scale.
Busy Brokers Notice Thoughtful Design:
AI-Assisted Cyber Questionnaire
- Product Design
- User Testing
- Prompt Engineering
- @ Relay Platform - Cyber | 2019 - 2022
Problem
All companies face cyber threats. Your broker decides you need cyber insurance. To get a quote, they must complete a provider's technical questionnaire.
Cyber is Intimidating
The technical nature of cyber creates hesitation in offering it, which opens brokers up to liability if an attack happens.
Additional Overhead
Offering cyber on top of primary coverages is a delay. Broker has to collect more information, explain cyber risk.
Opportunity
If we help Insurance Brokers get past the tough cyber insurance questions, they should gain enough domain confidence to streamline information gathering from clients.
AI-Powered Email Quote Bot
- Product Design
- User Testing
- Prompt Engineering
- @ Relay Platform - Cyber | 2019 - 2022
Problem
Evolving customer feedback made us rethink our long-held assumptions about our in-app submission workflow.
Too Many Logins
Brokers felt overwhelmed by all the portals they used. While great, our product was still another portal that required logins, onboarding, and so on.
Outlook is Home
Brokers lived in their inboxes, using folders to organize docs and push them to other systems via integrations.
Overkill Proposal
We generated detailed quote proposals. But I realized the lean way of working we were advocating required a more actionable, lighter proposal.
Opportunity
Rethink the boundaries of the product. If we enable Insurance Brokers to get quotes without having to leave their inbox, they may be happy to trade pricing accuracy for reduced effort and time-to-quote. We might then see faster, stickier adoption.
Risk Tower Visualization
- Discovery
- Product Design
- Stakeholder Management
- @ Relay Platform - Cyber | 2019 - 2022
Problem
Insurance underwriters ask other insurers to reinsure (share) a risk too high for them to handle alone. The Risk Tower is a 2D progress bar showing quotes and gaps.
Inundated With Email
Brokers get email quotes from multiple providers and manually track who-what-how-much in spreadsheets.
Hard to Compare Quotes
Quotes are not standardized and have exclusions, which makes it hard to compare apples-to-apples.
Opportunity
If we implement a standardized quoting process for all providers, we can save brokers a lot of time, In Order To Avoid: costly errors, and get users hooked on tracking deal progress visually.
░▒▓ Odds & Ends
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Projects from prior years include my log of ▟ 20+ research methods, a ▙ sketchy prototype of a client portal, some early ▚ mobile prototypes, and a reverse ▄▀▄ statistical calculator I invented.
How I Work
I help my team build a shared foundation and make learning, prioritization, and shipping more grounded, collaborative, and nimble.
The mindsets feed each other. Learning expands or constricts choices for prioritization, while prioritizing refines what we need to learn. Learning can require shipping, and shipping always creates new learning.
Learning Mindset
As a designer, I play a key role in gathering, making sense of, and disseminating knowledge about the business domain and customers. I work collaboratively to strengthen our shared understanding of complex, ambiguous, or even conflicting information, so we can drive better outcomes, reduce risk, and uncover opportunities.
Collaborative Activities:
- Dig deeper in continuous discovery interviews
- Understand customer's business better than them
- Explore via mocks and prototypes
- Zooming out (context, map workflows, when, where, with whom)
- Zooming in (language, mental model, decision making)
- Facilitate alignment between sales, support, product, eng
I Help Avoid:
- Premature convergence on a problem or solution
- Tunnel vision, shutting down curiosity
- Paralysis due to ambiguity/complexity
- Blind spots, missing key insights
- Changing direction without rationale
- Slow innovation and ingrained assumptions
Check out 20+ Research Techniques I've Used
Deciding Mindset
As a designer, I help my team prioritize what truly matters. By deeply understanding our customers, I facilitate better trade-offs that balance user experience with time to market e.g., what to ship now and what to wait on. I also help clarify what truly matters to our customers, allowing them to make meaningful progress rather than stall chasing perfection. Deciding is also about taking everything we have learned and choosing a philosophy/perspective to be our differentiator.
Collaborative Activities:
- Segmentation (choose how to view the market)
- Evaluating and prioritizing learnings (choosing signals)
- Stating assumptions (to validate via research or shipping)
- Must-have and effort/impact analysis
- Feasibility assessments
- Roadmaps and strategies
- Pre-mortems
I Help Avoid:
- Building big risky things
- Low ROI initiatives
- Sales-Product-Design conflicts
- Stalled projects and decision fatigue
- Fighting fires
Shipping Mindset
As a designer, I help product and engineering turn desired outcomes into reality, whether it’s a product feature or an internal initiative. I work with product and engineering colleagues to maintain a bias for action. Shipping is about removing organizational obstacles, cultivating collaboration, and balancing scope, quality, and budget during implementation.
Collaborative Activities:
- Bias for action and experimentation
- Shipping as a learning tool
- Defining success metrics and standards of quality
- Balancing speed and UX quality
- Collaboration (minimizing hand-offs)
- Clear communication & coordination
- Revisiting and iterating on shipped work
I Help Avoid:
- Paralysis, waiting for certainty
- Erosion of user trust due to quality
- Loss of team morale and confidence
- Miscommunication in handoffs
- Missing out synergies of collaboration
- Never iterating
- Not gauging customer impact