Saving $1.5M/year with insurance pricing tools for actuaries

I led design on a tool to help actuaries model and submit pricing changes for state approval in days instead of weeks.

The challenge

Root Insurance was losing $1.5M/year in revenue because of a slow, inefficient process for changing insurance prices.

I was invited to join the Pricing Tooling team as their first designer to help accelerate the pricing process.

Insurance Pricing 101

The price you see from an auto insurance company is calculated from a formula. That formula is made from hundreds of factors such as your age, your accident history, and how many drivers are on your policy.

To create price changes, actuaries update those formulas by rebalancing, adding, and removing factors.

Understanding actuaries' process challenges

Mark, my Product Manager, already knew from working with Root’s actuaries that they often used and struggled with tools traditionally used by software engineers.

With the help of our UX Research partner, we interviewed five actuaries to validate, rank, and better understand their challenges. They shared their screens and showed us how they navigated Github, Amazon S3, and the occasional command line.

Sharing our opportunities

After mapping the technical process in detail, we condensed our insights and opportunities into a journey map.

The vision: a self-service web app for Actuaries

We estimated that Actuaries would finish projects 5 days faster if they were freed from having to rely on engineers and an engineering-oriented toolchain.

Building a web app would help Actuaries test pricing changes faster and also create an auditable reference for all of Root's pricing formulas.

Object-first design

I started our design process by working with Mark to map the new app's objects, their relationships, and their data properties.

Iterating on our object map helped formalize new language as we shared ideas with the team.

I engaged our Staff Engineers in conversations about data types and validation. As a former frontend developer, I could speak their language while showing them exactly how a backend decision would affect the frontend designs.

Sitemaps before screens

Once we refined the core objects, I began to build and iterate the new app’s sitemap.

Working at this fidelity encouraged the team to focus on information architecture. We iterated quickly by saving discussions about layout and interaction design until we were only making minor edits to the app structure.

Tackling the biggest source of delays

We saw in our research that actuaries had to run a tedious process to test pricing formula changes, which often happens dozens of times in each project.

Convert a CSV file into an Excel spreadsheet
Edit the spreadsheet
Convert the spreadsheet back into a CSV, using command line scripts
Commit their CSV changes to git
Wait for RStudio to generate graphs, charts, and tables for impact analysis
Read workflow notification messages in Slack
Navigate Amazon S3 folders to download impact analysis artifacts

The process was tedious and unforgiving. Making a typo or formatting error caused workflow errors that engineers would have to fix for actuaries.

We reimagined the actuary’s experience as a web UI with simplified version control and inline validation.

Eliminating wasteful dataset generation

Actuaries waited 30 to 40 minutes each time they ran a workflow because their datasets were being regenerated on every run.

I designed components that let actuaries reuse datasets and regenerate them only as needed. This would save them an estimated 2 working days per project.

Pivoting away before high-fidelity designs

Our project ended when the company deprioritized our entire team roadmap. At that point we had sketched and gotten positive feedback on a complete MVP for a self-service web app, which included a review system for easier collaboration.

The value of showing incomplete ideas

I learned a valuable approach to avoid getting stuck when designing for complex domains. Sketches aren’t just for turning abstract ideas into artifacts you can discuss—they help you build your domain understanding, one discussion at a time.

It felt unnerving at first but when I learned to share incomplete sketches with my teammates, the project progressed more smoothly despite the complex subject matter.