Turning an insurance proof of concept into a platform
ShareCover had proven the idea, but its proof-of-concept platform couldn't carry the business into new products, partners and markets.
IAG · ShareCover · Solutions Architect and Technical Lead (Contract)
2018 – 2021
The problem
ShareCover is IAG's insurance for the sharing economy. It started as a proof of concept, and to grow into new products and markets, both new verticals and new partners, it needed to become enterprise-grade software.
Constraints
- Growing while rebuilding. The business was signing partners and expanding while the platform underneath it was replaced.
- Partners shape the product. Each partner integration brought its own requirements, so technical strategy and sales were tied together.
- Inside a large insurer. Enterprise expectations for reliability and process applied to what had been a startup-style experiment.
What I did
I was responsible for technical strategy, architecture, software, DevOps, partner integration and technical sales.
- Defined the technical strategy through workshops and partner sales meetings.
- Architected and built a microservice architecture on AWS using serverless.
- Built a CI/CD pipeline that automated multi-stage infrastructure-as-code deployments.
- Built a real-time read model in Neo4j, fed by AWS Kinesis streams.
- Created a customer-facing email dropbox service on SES, S3, SNS, SQS and Lambda.
Outcome
- ARR grew from $1m to $4m in FY19/20.
- A platform built to expand vertically and horizontally into new products and markets.