Partner white-label sites - Costco Travel Insurance
Led a six-month partner-grade launch spanning customer journey, insurance rules, membership verification, APIs, compliance, analytics, UAT, and operational readiness.
- My role
- Product lead for white-label journey, requirements, prioritization, UAT, and release readiness
- Timeframe
- Six-month MVP delivery
- Evidence boundary
- $23M+ is realized first-year sales. Approximately $54M is the 2026 forecast.
The business problem
Over two years, I led product work across multiple partner white-label experiences. Costco was the largest Tier 1 launch and established a reusable model for shared insurance capabilities, partner-specific journeys, and lighter Tier 2 implementations.
Costco and Travelex needed to replace a primarily weekday, call-center-driven purchase model with a digital journey that customers could use at any time. The visible output was a website; the actual product crossed membership controls, quote and plan rules, traveler enrollment, payment, policy issuance, analytics, CRM, support, and release operations.
My product approach
I treated the white-label site as an end-to-end insurance product, not a standalone frontend. My work connected the customer journey to the systems, rules, and teams required to quote, purchase, issue, and support a policy.
- Shape the customer journey. I mapped the path from partner entry and membership verification through quote, plan selection, traveler details, payment, policy confirmation, and post-purchase support.
- Turn journey choices into requirements. I converted customer and partner needs into field behavior, validation rules, acceptance criteria, analytics events, UAT scenarios, and release gates.
- Connect frontend behavior to backend rules. I worked with design and engineering to define how the interface requested and displayed quote data, handled state and destination constraints, and preserved context across API calls.
- Define the policy data flow. I clarified how customer inputs moved through offering and eligibility rules, pricing, payment, policy issuance, CRM, and downstream servicing systems, including ownership at each handoff.
- Design for failure and recovery. I specified actionable error messages, retry and escalation paths, monitoring needs, and service handoffs so customers were not stranded when membership, quote, payment, or issuance steps failed.
- Use evidence to improve the journey. I combined partner constraints, customer friction, operational feedback, analytics, and compliance requirements to make tradeoffs and prioritize post-launch improvements.
Decisions that mattered
- Launch without waiting for ideal SSO. I separated the non-negotiable requirement—verified membership—from the implementation preference, then recommended the available membership API with monitoring, clearer errors, and a measured path to reduce friction.
- Treat support as part of the product. Error recovery, CRM, customer service, and operational readiness were included in scope rather than left for after launch.
- Make ownership visible. Costco, Product, Engineering, Underwriting, Compliance, Payments, QA, Analytics, and Operations worked through shared dependencies, named decisions, and launch gates.
Outcome
The product launched in six months and created a scalable 24/7 partner distribution channel. It generated more than $23M in first-year sales. The approximately $54M figure is a 2026 forecast, not a realized result.
What I learned
Partner product ownership means owning the connections between teams, systems, data, and operating handoffs. Next time, I would lock data-contract ownership and platform baselines even earlier.