Jetty - Partner Portal

Company Overview

Jetty is a financial services company with a vision to make renting a home more affordable and effortless for everyone. Jetty's flagship product, Jetty Deposit, replaces traditional cash security deposits with a low-cost insurance policy, easing financial pressure on renters (Members) while providing property managers (Partners) with protection against damages and unpaid rent.

As a Senior Product Manager at Jetty, I owned the creation and the execution of the Partner Experience product strategy.

Company Goals

From 2020 to 2023, Jetty achieved an impressive 107% revenue growth. However, this period of rapid scaling introduced operational inefficiencies and challenges in unit economics.

In 2024, our company goals targeted steady revenue growth while aiming to improve our operational efficiency. Company goals alone, however, are not very useful for product teams. These high-level outcome metrics are lagging indicators that need to be distilled into leading driver metrics that the product team can influence in isolation.

To achieve this, I collaborated with business stakeholders to identify the product KPIs below as our success metrics.

Company Goals Input Metric Product KPIs Context
Grow revenue by xx% Maintain low churn rate of x% Increase Partner NPS score by 20% Retaining partners that we’ve already spent money to acquire is an important lever to steady revenue growth.

From a product perspective, we can support a low churn rate and increase our NPS score by improving our Partners’ claims experience.
Maintain flat OpEx cost basis Reducing servicing costs per claim by xx% Reduce claim processing time by 50% As we continue to steadily grow, we must ensure our costs do not rise proportionately with revenue.

While some costs will inevitably increase due to this growth, tech-led optimizations will help us improve operational efficiency, thereby keeping our OpEx flat and reducing burn.

Problem Space

Increase Partner NPS Score by 20%

To improve our NPS score, we identified high-friction areas in the user journey through prior generative research. Based on feedback from the Partner Success team and churn disposition data, claims and reporting were still the most critical areas to address.

Pain points in the Parnter user journey

I collaborated with our lead designer to identify a representative cohort of Partners for further problem discovery. Using the Opportunity Solution Tree framework below, we mapped out the problem space to answer "which problems (red), if solved, could help improve our metric (blue)?"

Problem Themes
  1. Incomplete claim submissions - Existing Zendesk claim submission UX lacked field-level validation, leading to incomplete submissions requiring further correspondence
  2. Lengthy claims submissions - Partners were spending 10-15 minutes per claim; extrapolated over ~144 claims per month meant ~24-36 hrs filing claims per month
  3. Lacking visibility into filed claims - Managing claims is challenging due to unclear status updates.
  4. Lacking visibility into claim payout - Current experience made it challenging to understand which account a claim was paid to

Reduce Claims Processing Time by 50%

Improving the operational efficiency of our internal teams means we can avoid scaling headcount as grow. The Claims Intake and Partner Success teams interface with our Partners the most. Below is an OST of their most tedious and manual pain points.

Problem Themes
  1. Manual claim creation - Existing manual process requires Intake member to use 4 different systems to create a claim, taking ~12 min per claim
  2. Ad hoc reporting requests - PS team supports Partners with manual reports about the status of their claims
  3. Redundant correspondence - Lack of self-serve options leads to many back-and-forth touch points

Solution Space

To address the identified problems and reach our outcomes, we did Jetty's largest Partner product launch...

                                   Jetty Partner Portal 🎉

MVP

We explored various solutions and evaluated them against the following dimensions:

  1. Value: Will customers find value in the solution?⁠⁠​
  2. Usability: Will users know how to use the product intuitively?⁠⁠​
  3. Feasibility: Can o team build it given the current skills, resources, and timeline?
  4. ⁠​Viability: Does the solution work for various parts of our business?⁠

Ultimately, we chose to build the Partner Portal using a 3rd party tool, Retool, due to several advantages: 

  1. Time to Market / Value: Retool cuts front-end development time by over 50%, enabling faster value delivery to customers and quicker iteration cycles.
  2. Controlled Access & Security: Ensures authentication, authorization, and tracking with minimal configuration.
  3. Cost-Benefit Analysis:
    1. In-House Development ~10 weeks of dev work, totals ~$165,000 in one-time cost.
    2. Retool: Fixed annual cost with unlimited users + ~4 weeks of dev work totals $112,500.

I collaborated with my Engineering Manager to draft a business case proposal highlighting these factors for the heads of Product & Engineering as they negotiated the Retool contract.

Product Requirements

v1 - Initial Launch

  • Authentication with Auth0: Implemented for secure and reliable user authentication.
  • Streamlined Claims Submission: Enhanced validation processes ensure clean first-time claim submissions, reducing errors and improving efficiency.
  • Automated Claim Creation: Created a claim in Snapsheet, our internal tool used to manage claims

v2 - Enhanced Document Management

  • Automated Document Pull: Integration with property management systems to automatically retrieve necessary documents, reducing manual efforts and speeding up the claims process.

v3 - Claims Reporting for Owners & Managers

  • Reporting Feature: Introduced claims reporting capabilities tailored for owners and managers to help mitigate data sharing compliance risks.

v4 - Expanded Claims Reporting

  • RBAC-Driven Reporting: Rolled out reporting features for all remaining Partners, driven by Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to ensure data security and appropriate access levels.

GTM Strategy

Phase Activity Description Owners
UAT User Acceptance Testing Verifying that claims submitted via the Portal meet product requirements and system perform as expected before full deployment. Claims Ops, Product
Pre-Pilot Claims Team Workflow Updates Update the SOP for Claims Intake team and update any workflows in Snapsheet (internal claims tool) Claims Ops
Internal Demo & Training Demo and train internal teams on the new process and tools Product
Pilot GTM Pilot GTM Comms Email campaign to Pilot Partners' corporate and site-level teams Email Marketing
Pilot Pilot w/ 4 Partners Pilot runs for 2 weeks. Any feedback is triaged in Slack channel by PM Product
Fast Follows Fast follows on high priority issues & feedback Product & Engineering
Rollout GTM Landing Page Create a landing page to introduce and explain the Claims Portal Marketing, Design
GTM Comms Email campaign to corporate and site-level teams Email Marketing
Rollout Launch Date Deprecate the existing Zendesk claim submission form and redirect users to the landing page Claims Ops

Measuring Success

To achieve successful product outcomes, products must first meet a minimum bar of lower-level functional metrics before they can impact higher-level business metrics.

Health & Performance Metrics

We set up alerting and monitoring in Datadog to receive immediate notifications for critical errors, triggering alerts in Slack and HOT tickets in Jira. This helped our team proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve issues, quickly closing the feedback loop. Our fast follows and bug fixes quickly improved our claim submission success rate to 100%.

Adoption Metrics

After ensuring our product was working reliably, we looked at how users adopted it. I worked with our Analytics team to set up a dashboard to understand Portal adoption, segmenting it into the following three categories:

  1. Acquisition - how many users are using the product? (i.e: new user sign-ups / time)
  2. Engagement - how often are they using the product? (i.e: DAU/WAU/MAU, session length)
  3. Usage - how are they using the product? (i.e: feature usage)

Success Metrics

Upon the launch of v1, we successfully reduced the time to process a claim by 60%, allowing us to reduce servicing costs per claim. With each iteration, we alsogrew Partner adoption of the Portal and ultimately improved the NPS score by 25%.