CLEAR: Building a Product Function Inside Marketing

The Problem

Across IPG's portfolio of brands, the quote and enrollment experience was where customers were won or lost. Six different Q&E sites, each serving a distinct brand, each optimized in isolation for a single moment: the conversion.

Two problems lived underneath that.

The first was organizational. The work that drove conversion outcomes was product work in everything but name. Roadmap influence, A/B testing infrastructure, design systems, customer research, conversion ownership. But it sat scattered across marketing and tech with no team that owned it end to end, and no shared accountability for the result.

The second was strategic. Optimizing purely for conversion treats pet insurance like a transaction. It isn't. A customer enrolled on a plan that doesn't fit churns within the year and leaves with a worse opinion of the brand than when they arrived. We were measuring the sale and ignoring everything after it.

I built CLEAR to fix both.

What CLEAR Is

CLEAR stands for the values the team operates by: Clarity, Learnings, Empathy, Accessibility, Results. In practice it's a cross functional accelerator that brought product discipline to the quote and enrollment experience across the brand portfolio.

I founded it proactively, without a formal mandate, because the work needed an owner and no role existed for it yet. At its peak it grew to a 30+ person cross functional team spanning design, engineering, marketing, and analytics.

A few principles shaped how it ran:

Shared metrics, not departmental ones. Everyone on CLEAR was accountable to the same outcomes regardless of their home org. That single change removed most of the cross functional friction that had stalled this kind of work before.

Experimentation as the operating system. Instead of betting on big bang redesigns, we ran a continuous testing program. I implemented Kameleoon as our experimentation platform and the team ran 60+ A/B tests and research projects, small measurable bets that compounded.

Design at the strategy table. Designers on CLEAR weren't executing tickets. They framed the problems, designed the experiments, and presented results to leadership alongside analytics.

The Strategy

Rather than chase isolated wins, I organized CLEAR's work around four strategic pillars, each backed by research and a modeled impact estimate:

1. Site Speed. Performance as a conversion lever, not just an engineering concern.
2. Personalization. Meeting customers where they are instead of a single generic path.
3. Mobile. Designing for where the traffic actually was.
4. End to End Journey. Owning the full experience, not just the conversion moment.

This gave the team a way to prioritize against a thesis instead of reacting to whatever was loudest that week. Every experiment laddered up to one of the four.

The Work

CLEAR's output was broad, but a few threads stand out.

Six Q&E sites, rebuilt. We overhauled the quote and enrollment experience across the full portfolio: APHI, Figo, AKC, Felix, PPU, and PPI. Each had its own brand constraints and compliance requirements, which is exactly why a systemized approach mattered.

Pre-packaged plans. One of the clearest wins came from rethinking how customers chose a plan. Instead of asking people to assemble coverage from scratch, we designed pre-packaged plans that made the right choice the easy choice. The result: +12% conversion rate and +25% gross written premium comparing the most recent four months against the prior four, with $3.5M+ in GWP in the first 16 weeks alone and roughly $10M in additional forecast for the year.

Design systems underneath it all. None of the Q&E velocity would have been possible without systems to build on. The team built and maintained the component libraries that let six brands move in parallel without reinventing the same patterns six times.

The Results

The shift from conversion thinking to value thinking produced measurable, sustained impact:

• $38M in incremental value delivered in 2025 through CLEAR and related initiatives
• $100M+ in incremental value across the portfolio since 2022
• +12% CvR and +25% GWP from pre-packaged plans, with ~$10M in additional annual forecast
• A roughly 10% lift in retention, the metric that mattered most given the whole premise was designing for customers who stay, not just customers who sign

What Made It Work

The honest answer is that the hardest part of CLEAR had little to do with design craft. It was organizational.

Getting six brands, multiple departments, and dozens of stakeholders aligned around a shared, longer horizon definition of success required constant translation work. Turning design intuition into business language. Turning analytics into design direction. Protecting the team's mandate when quarterly pressure pushed back toward short term conversion wins.

My job was less about designing screens and more about designing the conditions for the team to succeed: the mandate, the metrics, the rituals, and the air cover that let good people do their best work.

What I Learned

CLEAR taught me what design leadership looks like at the business level. Systems thinking applied to an org chart instead of a component library.

The pattern is the same one that shaped Gex: find the structural problem underneath the visible symptoms, build the system that fixes it at the root, and prove it with numbers the business cares about. With Gex, that system was a component library. With CLEAR, it was a team.

Selected Work