Chief Product Officer / Canada
Three changes that cost something members could see
- Premium and premium equivalents
- C$1.38bn
- Lacmorin Life, 2025
- Plan members served
- 412,000
- Through 9,400 employer plan sponsors across Canada
- Product colleagues
- 68
- Product management, design, research, bilingual content and accessibility
Decisions & consequences
01Putting a case manager's call behind every online disability claim
Online short-term disability claiming went live in our member app late in 2020, and I had designed it. In its first full year, 11,600 claims arrived online. By the tenth day after submission, 44% were still missing a physician's statement, an employer statement or a signed consent, and the median time to a decision was 21 days. Members were waiting for income while unwell, and our complaints about the process had reached 312 a year.
The head of digital channels proposed automated reminders and document chasing, a nine-month build that fitted our self-service plan. The chief financial officer supported that route because it added no permanent headcount. I disagreed. Our research calls showed that many incomplete files came from claimants who did not know which form their doctor needed or who were too ill to pursue it, and reminders would simply repeat the confusion more often.
In 2022 I recommended that every online claim trigger a telephone call from a named case manager within two business days, in the member's chosen language. That required sixteen additional case managers at C$1.45 million a year. My product budget funded the first year so the vice-president of disability claims did not have to cut elsewhere, and we deferred the automated chasing work by nine months. We also stopped reporting the online share of claims as a goal.
A year later, incomplete files at day ten had fallen to 19%, the median time to a decision to 13 days and process complaints to 141. The online share rose from 52% to 61%, because members were less afraid of starting a claim alone. The automation was later built around the case managers' notes rather than in place of them.
What I would do differently is involve plan administrators from the start. About a third of the remaining delays came from employer statements, and we only redesigned the administrator's part of the journey a year afterwards.
Writing a plan's French and English wordings side by side
In 2023 we were preparing a packaged health and dental plan for employers with three to forty-nine staff, sold through independent advisers. Our established practice was to draft the English wording, obtain approval and then translate it. When legal counsel compared the language versions of the plan it would replace, they found 37 differences of meaning. One, concerning a paramedical maximum, had already been settled on the more generous French reading at a cost of C$310,000 over two years.
I proposed co-drafting: two writers producing each language at the same time from one product definition, a joint legal review and comprehension testing with 64 members, half in each language, including screen-reader users. The vice-president of sales for Quebec and eastern Ontario disagreed strongly. Co-drafting would move the launch by eleven weeks and miss the spring renewal season. He suggested launching in English in the other provinces first. I declined, because francophone members outside Quebec would have received a translated booklet and the problem would have continued.
The president accepted the delay. Co-drafting, review and testing cost C$520,000 more than the usual process, and advisers had to carry some renewing clients on older plans until autumn. My team produced a shared glossary that is now used for every Lacmorin wording.
Legal review found no differences of meaning between the two versions. First-year sales reached 1,180 employer groups against a plan of 1,350, a shortfall the sales team attributes mostly to the missed season. In the first nine months, calls asking what the plan covered ran 18% lower per thousand members than on the predecessor plan.
What I would do differently concerns the plan-administrator guide. We left it as an English-first document because I regarded it as secondary. Advisers soon reported that administrators in Quebec were using a translated guide that described enrolment rules differently from the booklet. It should have been co-drafted with the wording, and since 2024 it has been.
Rebuilding evidence-of-insurability questions with the chief underwriter
Members who apply for optional life cover, or for disability amounts above the level granted without evidence, complete a health questionnaire. Lacmorin receives about 21,000 such applications a year. In 2024 our questionnaire had 27 questions, many compound, such as whether the applicant had ever had, been treated for or been advised to seek treatment for any of eleven conditions. 38% of applications were held for clarification, the median time to a decision was 47 days and 22% of held applications were never completed.
I proposed rewriting every question so that it covered one subject over a stated period, with an example wherever members had hesitated in testing. The chief underwriter agreed with most of the work but refused to remove the closing question about any other condition, which she considered essential protection against non-disclosure. We kept it, limited to the previous five years and to conditions that had caused time off work or a specialist referral. The questionnaire grew from 27 questions to 34, which our digital team disliked because longer forms usually lose applicants.
Our reinsurers had to approve the change, and their review took four months. My team tested the new wording in both languages with 48 members on phones and computers, including keyboard-only and screen-reader users.
In the first twelve months after launch in 2025, applications held for clarification fell to 15%, the median time to a decision to 22 days and abandonment to 9%. The approval rate moved from 82% to 81%, which the chief underwriter and I read as evidence that the questions had become clearer, not looser. It is too early to know whether misrepresentation findings at claim will change, and I report that openly to the risk committee.
What I would do differently is invite the reinsurers' underwriters to our testing sessions at the start. Their four-month review repeated questions that members had already answered for us.