Policy Pro

Credit Karma's insurance marketplace has proven revenue-positive, prompting leadership to double down with a focus on longer-term innovation.

In late 2025, I was tapped to lead an innovation pod exploring horizon 2+ initiatives — engagement-first bets not expected to drive near-term revenue, but designed to cement Credit Karma as the go-to destination for insurance shoppers.

Policy Pro explained

The problem

Meet Kevin

I am...

a 34-year-old married multi-car owner

I am trying to...

find ways to save on my insurance


but...
I don’t know how much coverage I need or how much I should be paying for insurance

because...

Comparing insurance is confusing, time consuming, and full of jargon

which makes me feel...

Unsure if I have the right coverage or if I am overpaying

Kevin received a notice that his car insurance premium is increasing. He’s frustrated because he doesn’t understand why his premium increased and a unsure if he has the right coverage for him.

There must be a better way…

Kevin does a google search for insurance providers in his area and tediously fills out one insurance application after another. The terminology is confusing and each provider seems to offer slightly different coverages.

Why is one provider cheaper than another? How much coverage do I really need? Am I covered if my brother drives my car? he asks himself.

For millions of Americans, this is how they experience the insurance industry.

My Role

I led the innovation pod from an ambiguous brief through a validated vision and a sequenced path to ship.

My scope included:

  • Reframing the problem from a feature gap to a member confidence gap

  • Aligning a newly formed cross-functional pod through paired Foundation and Design Sprints

  • Leading generative and evaluative research in close partnership with Product Research

  • Translating the vision into a sequenced set of in-market experiments with the PM

While I owned design direction, success depended on influencing leadership's appetite for Horizon 2+ work and building alignment across Product, Engineering, Research, BD, and Partner Success.

Understanding the Business

Connected Policy had low retention and the Zendrive acquisition had left a dead end in the surface. The opportunity was engagement, not conversion.

Introducing: Policy Pro

An always-on insurance copilot — not another marketplace, but a reason to return between purchase moments.

01

All your policies in one place

02

Personalized coverage recommendations

03

“Done for you” agentic experiences

04

Always on policy monitoring

Before and after

The insurance surface was very much focused on drive score with no real policy monitoring features.

Before – Drive score focused

After Policy focused

Now, back to Kevin…

Kevin discovers Policy Pro

Kevin sees an ad for Credit Karma about a new feature called Policy Pro that monitors your coverage, automatically shops rates, and allows you to ask questions about your current policy to help you better understand what’s covered...

Policy Pro explains his coverage and makes suggestion

Kevin fills out some basic information and seamlessly links his current insurance policy.

Credit Karma suggests increasing his coverage for bodily injury liability. Unsure why Kevin is able to ask questions about what bodily injury liability coverage and why he may want to increase his coverage...

Policy Pro alerts Kevin to savings by bundling his insurance

Kevin receives a notification from Credit Karma stating that it noticed a new mortgage trade line on their account and that he could save up to $845 per year by bundling his home and auto insurance...

Policy Pro proactively shops for Kevin even when insurance isn’t top of mind, unlocking savings

Kevin receives a notification from Credit Karma that there is a cheaper bundle available to him from Geico with an estimated annual savings of $480 per year...

Kevin is now confident that he has the best insurance for him thanks to Policy Pro from Credit Karma

Making It Shippable

We broke the vision into three testable bets: Connected Policy Lite, an AMA chat experiment, and a Claude-powered internal alignment tool.

Activation & data collection

Current state

Chat MVP

Policy Pro vision

Experiment 1 – Lite Data collection

Hypothesis

If we provide members with personalized insights about their auto insurance with a lite connection
then members will better understand their insurance rate and be more likely to connect their insurance policy to Credit Karma in the future
which we will measure by number of lite connections created
Success metric will be # of member engagements with data collection

Key metrics

  • # of lite connections created

  • Data collection abandonment rate

  • Return visits after lite data collection

Experiment 2 – AI Chat

Problem statement

Members who visit the Credit Karma Insurance tab have limited insight into why their rate is what it is. Showing rate factors (credit score, driving record, vehicle details) in a personalized, data-injected format may create engagement pull and motivate members to improve their financial profile. Separately, an AI chat assistant may answer the questions members have in the moment but cannot currently resolve without leaving the app.

Two open questions must be answered before investing in full build-out:

  • Do members care enough about rate factors to explore detail pages?

  • Does the AI chat feel useful, or does it go ignored?

Learning objectives

  • Does the Policy Pro chat feel valuable to members at all?

  • What do members naturally reach for the chat to do?

  • Do members type something unprompted when given open access?

  • Do they seem relieved or indifferent after getting an answer?

Impact

Buy-in secured from leadership. A horizon 2+ vision with near-term bets already in production — and a team that stayed oriented toward member problems the whole way through.