Simply Business: Not All Opportunities Need Solutions

Mina Kasherova, a Senior Product Manager at Simply Business, and her team kept hearing about the same pain point in most of their customer interviews: the havoc of late client payments. Simply Business is one of the UK’s biggest business-insurance providers, specializing in public-liability insurance for small-to-midsize enterprises and insuring more than 750,000 small businesses, landlords, and not-for-profit organizations. Many of Simply Business’s customers are freelancers and small-business owners who often struggle with clients not paying invoices on time, creating financial strain. Not only did the team hear about this pain point in a number of their customer interviews, but they also had market research and government data that suggested that late payments were a top problem for small businesses.

When Mina’s team started assessing and prioritizing the opportunity space, choosing this opportunity as their target opportunity was a no-brainer. They generated several solutions and identified a diverse set of three to test: 1) articles to educate small-businesses owners on how to prevent late payments, 2) the ability to offer discounts for early payments, and 3) a service that automated payment collection.

Within a week, they were able to launch three assumption tests, one for each idea. To test if their customers were willing to read content about how to prevent late payments, they integrated a couple of existing blog articles about late payments onto their customer-account page and measured how many customers clicked through to read them. For invoice discounting and automatic payment collection, their riskiest assumptions were around the complexity of each of these ideas. They wanted to start by testing if customers understood each of the offerings. They mocked up a summary of each program and used an unmoderated usability-testing tool to ask small-business owners who had recently had challenges with late payments to read through the summary and explain what they thought each program offered. They then asked each participant to explain if the offering would have helped them collect on their most recent late payment. They were primarily interested in evaluating if the participants fully understood the benefits of each solution.

Unfortunately, the first assumption test failed. A very small percentage of customers clicked through to read the articles about how to prevent late payments. The team was concerned that the customer-account page might not be the right place to integrate the content and started to brainstorm other places to share the content. But they stopped once they watched the videos from their other two tests. Not only did most participants struggle to understand the solutions, but most also expressed that, while they had issues with late payments, they weren’t interested in third-party help in solving the problem. They each expressed that they had strong relationships with their clients, and they felt that removing themselves from the collections process would harm the relationship.

This was a big surprise for Mina’s team. Even though they had heard late payments come up as a pain point in interview after interview and they had market research reinforcing what they had heard, the results of their assumption tests were clear. Their customers did not want Simply Business to help them with this problem. Now, to be clear, this doesn’t mean there wasn’t a real need here. However, the team realized it wasn’t a need that they could address in the short term. It was no longer the highest-impact opportunity that they should tackle next.

Thankfully, Mina’s team had a strong habit of weekly interviews. So, when they revisited their opportunity solution tree to choose a new target opportunity, they weren’t starting from scratch. Their tree continued to evolve as they ran their assumption tests, and they already had a clear idea of what opportunity might be next. You might remember Raya Raycheva’s comment about the value of continuous interviewing from Chapter 5: “We killed an opportunity on Tuesday, chose a new one on Wednesday, and used our already-scheduled interviews on Thursday to learn about the new opportunity.” Raya was the User Research Lead on Mina’s team.

Mina and her team’s story illustrates why it’s so important not to get bogged down in analysis paralysis when assessing and prioritizing opportunities. All the data pointed in one direction, but when they started assumption testing, they collected another piece of the puzzle that completely changed the landscape. That’s going to happen. Fortunately, because Mina’s team moved quickly, they invested only a week into an opportunity that wasn’t going to be fruitful. Compare that to the weeks or months that many teams spend building the wrong features, and this hiccup is no big deal. Mina’s team also had the discipline and the wisdom to recognize when they were going down a troublesome path, and they quickly course-corrected. These course-corrections should be celebrated. The fruit of discovery work is often the time we save when we decide not to build something.