As the Chief Marketing Officer at Cerity, Matt Hovis’s role sits at the intersection of marketing and product design. Cerity is reimagining insurance to meet the needs of small businesses, making it easier, more flexible, and more transparent. Matt and his team have been a client of Slide UX since early 2020. Together, we’re working to refresh their marketing site, evolved how their worker’s comp prospects get quotes, reimagined their customer portal, and more.

In this edition of For Humans’ Sake, Partner & UX Managing Director Megan Baker talked to Matt about:

• Monitoring data constantly to adjust and optimize

• How an indirect career path can make you a more well-rounded leader

• Using experiments to avoid assumptions

• How Slide UX has become Cerity’s North Star for professionalism and execution within a partnership

Megan Baker: Can you share an example of a time when a user insight changed your assumptions?

Matt Hovis: “You know, honestly, we are surprised every week, if not every day, by some of the user interactions and the way that they challenge our assumptions.

“It’s little stuff like image, preferences, color preferences, topographical preferences, ways they use the product and the routes that they take through it, and big stuff, like who comes in the first place, our audience in general sometimes surprises us. We are a digital-first small business insurance offering so one might think that we would appeal first to primarily technologically-minded companies. And that's also true, but we also see some surprises in our audience like cleaning and janitorial service companies who have really flocked to our product in a way that we didn't initially anticipate.

“So by watching the data really on a daily basis and pulling weekly insights, we make adjustments and optimize and improve the product and of course sales as a result, but the surprises are constant. We really see them all the time—again from the little to the pretty big.

“We really make adjustments as quickly as we can.”

Megan: What decisions have you had to go back and revisit based on things you've learned along the way?

Matt: “Like my previous answer may have inferred, we revisit our decisions all the time. There's so many of them, it would be difficult for me to summarize. Again, a lot of our hunches play out to be true, but many of them don't and so everything from the way our product is structured from a flow standpoint and from an informational structure standpoint to little bitty things like word choices throughout, as we guide our users through the process of getting their business quoted for small business insurance.

“Where the order of form fields are, the number of forms, there should be per screen, little stuff like that matters a lot. When you start to optimize like that and see small percentage improvements on each screen from a conversion standpoint, and then you see that waterfall over the course of a year, how it results in conversion and therefore Premiums.

“So sales, it's massive. The little stuff matters a lot, and we learn that every day. We're reminded of that every day. So we focus quite a bit on that stuff.”

Megan: What professional advice would you give to your younger self?

Matt: I think my career has wandered quite a bit, in some ways it's always been in the field of marketing and creative generally, but it began in graphic design then wandered over to film production and commercial direction, to a lot of digital and internet interactive work and then to technology marketing in general.

“Advice I would give to my younger self is to do it again. It's really worked out well for me in that I think I've gathered a multi-disciplinary approach and therefore have a lot of experience in various areas that helped me out a lot in my role as a marketing officer.

“While it may have seemed strange to others and certainly confused people like my parents and the like, it's really made sense in the end. Staying the course, trust thyself, go forth and don't necessarily follow paths that others have carved before you might be some of the advice that I would give my younger self.”

Megan: What words of wisdom would you share with other product leaders, based on your experiences?

Matt: “You know, I don’t think I'm in a position to share words of wisdom necessarily because I feel like I'm learning all the time and continually and I aim to do so. I try to stay in a mindset of being open to new information. But I think one of the things I've learned over the last few years is to try not to make so many assumptions.

“The digital tool sets out there enable you to learn so much from user interactions and user behavior by looking at data and analytics that allow you to really learn the truth about what customer preferences are. So needless to say, you need to run experiments based on ideas that you have, but as few assumptions as you can make the better because you have an opportunity to learn by using these tools and taking a deeper look at things in general.”

Megan: How has Slide UX contributed to your success?

Matt: “There's no doubt that Slide UX has played a significant role in our success at Cerity. They've been a key part of the team through most of my tenure at the company. We brought them in early on to help shape the customer experience of our core product offering online, and it has proven so valuable and so professional and so reliable that we've kept them on a monthly relationship to continue developing the product further and continue building other customer experiences throughout our whole digital customer journey. They've been fantastic. They really have. They are kind of our North star for professionalism and execution.

“But they don't run it militaristically, they are human beings and they are engaged humans who are really committed to trying to understand our company and our customers and how we interact. I feel like they really function like a part of our internal team. I think our success actually matters to them far beyond their job as user experience designers.

“They'd been so valuable that we've just kept the relationship going and I don't plan for that to stop. We've got a lot more things we can do together. They're the type of team that we generate work for them to contribute to because it elevates everything at our company significantly.”

About For Humans’ Sake

If you’re passionate about making other people’s lives easier through great user experiences, you’ll enjoy For Humans’ Sake, a video series from Slide UX that curates wisdom and helpful insights from experienced product leaders in a bite-sized format.

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