In today’s webinar, we spoke with Julianna Muir, COO at Attune, Manisha Dias, AVP business development – strategic partnerships at SCOR, and Farooq Sheikh, insurance GTM lead at Unqork.
We tackled the question of how to develop truly flexible products, and how front end insurance experiences are driven by great teams, modern product development processes and a holistic understanding of regulatory constraints.
Here’s what we learnt:
Product development needs to be executed from end to end. Truly flexible products are visible as much in the front end as from dynamic back end processes. Insurers should start from the experience layer, emphasising UX and identifying the underwriting and data processes that would enable this flexibility. Julianna Muir says that this presents a mindset shift, with insurers rooting product development in customer outcomes.
Technological innovation doesn’t free product teams from regulatory constraints. For insurtechs, bottlenecks often arise from insurtechs not understanding the realities of regulatory and compliance limitations. While ambition is crucial, visions of new products are often scuppered by unrealistic attitudes to timeframes. Ultimately, regulators will adjust to insurtechs and fintechs – but for the moment, there is a balance between technological possibilities and regulatory reality.
45% of our audience say that their firm has implemented short term changes to their product roadmap over the last year, while a further 39% have been fundamental, medium to long term changes.
Diversify product teams, and promote more flexible internal communications. Successful product development teams are those that are closely aligned in terms of product vision, timescales and overcoming barriers to execution. Manisha Dias says that it is vital for product teams to distinguish between long-term vision and short-term deliverables. Product teams should cooperate with commercial and strategy teams to develop robust product roadmaps.
76% think that the pandemic has accelerated trends in product development cycles that existed before the pandemic.
Product development doesn’t end when the product reaches the customer. Instead, this is just the beginning for a product that evolves mid-cycle. The ability to deliver real time adjustments to live products has shifted product life-cycles from 1-2 years to a genuinely continuous process. Farooq Sheikh points to software as the future of insurance, with the product team well placed to leverage customer data and adapt products.
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Matt Kenyon is a content producer at Insurtech Insights.
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