Department Spotlight: the Insights Team
Learn how Lumin Digital’s Insights Department uses research and analysis to power game-changing results in proactive product evolution.
What if your bank or credit union had an entire department dedicated to realizing your organization’s full potential? A team that spent their days proactively researching and analyzing your products and services to ensure they’re providing the most value for your customers? It sounds too good to be true. But here at Lumin Digital, we have just that team.
Meet Lumin’s Insights Department. They use data and analysis to create insights that impact the evolution of our product. In this article, Kailen Campbell, the department’s manager, sheds light on what they do and why it matters.
Q: Tell us about your department at Lumin Digital. What it does, how it does it, and why.
Kailen: Our mission is to help ensure Lumin maximizes the value that it creates for its customers and end users. We use research, user testing, and product analytics (data analysis) to generate the insights that drive the continued evolution of our product to ensure it’s precisely what our customers need.
Our department analyzes all kinds of information, like customer feedback and usage data, to produce actionable recommendations that enable and empower our product managers, designers, and developers to maintain a superior user experience. Our primary focus is on our digital banking solution product, so we work very closely with the design team and product managers here at Lumin. We also collaborate with other departments like client services, sales, and marketing.
We apply various tools and tactics to gather information, and our work ranges from early-stage research to later-stage insights. We support the product roadmap to provide key findings that can help prioritize or even de-prioritize things on the roadmap, depending on what we find in the data.
Once we’ve committed to something on our product roadmap, like a new feature, we’ll conduct early-stage research to assess the feature’s feasibility and necessity before the design team gets started. This allows us to learn everything we can about the feature as users know it today in the marketplace. We can also identify its various use cases and ensure we have a starting point for our design team and product management.
If we want to understand the end-user or the feature better or get specific questions answered, we may conduct additional research through surveys or interviews. We’ll perform usability testing using clickable prototypes if we have a design concept we want to validate before investing in development and implementation.
Getting feedback this early in the design process allows us to make any changes before our developers build something out and deploy it across the entire user base. This saves time and money in the long run and allows us to implement additions and updates that we’re confident will enhance the user experience.
In later-stage insights, we run further assessments to analyze performance after something has been implemented, such as comparing the performance of original features to updated features. If we’re looking to keep an eye on the performance of a feature, for example, we’ll pull data relative to usage, adoption, abandonment, and so forth. We’ll track that performance over time to ensure we get the desired outcome. This strategy also lets us change course if something isn’t performing as expected.
Q. What does your typical day entail?
Kailen: Our workload is typically a mix of progress against our department initiatives and diving into specific requests from stakeholders within our organization. We use Jira to visualize and prioritize our activities for the day/week, allowing us to allocate ownership and track progress along the way.
As a team, we meet weekly to review progress and completed work and plan the priorities for the week ahead. Between those meetings, the team can work in any way that enables them to achieve the desired outcomes for the week. Sometimes that means we work from a coffee shop or our favorite chair instead of our desk. Occasionally, we jump from one assignment to another throughout the day to get a little mental break from the more tedious research and data-related work.
Our team comprises data aggregators, interpreters, and disseminators of information, so we spend our days doing just that. And we love it! We like to help our team find answers and ensure our findings are organized, comprehensive, visual, and shared across the organization regularly.
Q: What makes your department cool, different, or unique? Where are you doing something new or innovating in the marketplace or competitive field?
Kailen: In my past positions at marketing agencies, I worked with many product companies that needed help integrating research and testing into their process better. It’s actually pretty surprising how many companies make product decisions without gathering facts and figures beforehand and default to building strategies based on internal opinions and the loudest voices in the room. But, unsurprisingly, without data-backed insights, this can lead to gaps in the product and unhappy customers.
Our team is collaborative, and we work closely and well together. Our team includes designers, developers, product managers, UX researchers, and data analysts. What can be accomplished when you build a team that merges skill sets and understanding is impressive. Our team’s knowledge across the product journey helps us uncover better outcomes and make better decisions based on fact and logic.
Q: What stands out to you as Lumin as a company?
Kailen: Easy – our product and our people. Our products are well thought out in their purpose and well-executed through development and implementation. They’re constantly evolving and are appreciated by so many of our clients, end users, and fellow employees.
But our product is only as strong as the people behind it. We have a super talented and cooperative team supporting its development, which is no surprise because it takes a fantastic group to create, maintain, and evolve an exceptional product.
Q: What’s the one thing you’d want people to take away (if nothing else) about your department or Lumin?
Kailen: When it comes down to it, Lumin has a market-leading digital banking product that financial institutions can quickly implement. Our department gives our organization the insights it needs to continue proactively enhancing our product, improving the end-user experience, and keeping us ahead of the curve compared to our competitors. We are proud to be a part of such an exceptional organization with a really great product.
Contact us today to learn more about Lumin Digital, our team, and our digital banking solution. We want to learn how we can illuminate your success.
