Shaped Thoughts

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Product - Payments and Finance of Policy Expert

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Policy Expert is an Insurtech company, selling home, car and pet insurance policies to customers living in the UK.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Shaped Thoughts to accomplish?

• Create a new platform to take recurring insurance payments from customers
• Integrate with our existing technology stack

SOLUTION

How did you find Shaped Thoughts?

Referral

Why did you select Shaped Thoughts over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned
• Staff known to us

How many teammates from Shaped Thoughts were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Create a new tech platform that: 

1. Sets up recurring payments with customers 
2. Collects recurring payments from customers 
3. Sends customer emails 
4. Manages missed payments
5. Integrates with our workflow application (Zendesk) - to create/update tasks for our call centre staff
6. Publish event-based data to be consumed by various client services (e.g. reporting)
7. Integrate with out existing insurance trading platform

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

1. Completion by a fixed date The project had a fixed completion date, which was challenging to meet! But, Shaped Thoughts did meet the dates required
2. Completion of the minimum viable product (MVP). Shaped Thoughts were able to deliver more than the MVP that we'd agreed.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

At the start of the project, Shaped Thoughts provided an initial projected estimate of the project duration, which showed they should finish close to the necessary completion date. The project was run in 2-week sprints. At the end of every sprint, Shaped Thoughts provided updated projections, which had increasing levels of confidence that the date would be met. The project completed on time and we were very happy with this estimating and reporting approach that Shaped Thoughts used

What was your primary form of communication with Shaped Thoughts?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Honestly, there is so much about Shaped Thoughts, their skills and how they operate that is impressive. Here are a few examples:

1. Everyone at Shaped Thoughts is an A+ individual. No exceptions. Both for tech/business/analytical skills, and also for personality. In my experience (having worked with MANY other software companies), the quality of staff is HIGH during an initial consultation or engagement. Then usually the quality of staff provided later on can often be quite LOW - even though you're paying a high daily rate! 
2. Commitments. They did exactly what they said by the date they committed to do it. And, if they can't do something, they'll tell you. This clarity is really helpful. 
3. Delegation of authority/responsibility. Each piece of functionality being built (an "epic") is assigned a single developer to "own" it. There may be multiple developers who work on that epic, but one developer is responsible to make sure it gets done. This was very effective on our project. Again, this is very different to what I've seen in other companies. 
4. Trust. The above examples, plus many other things that Shaped Thoughts do means that they quickly build trust with the customer. This has certainly happened with Policy Expert.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Shaped Thoughts could have done differently?

None

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CPTO of Policy Expert

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Insuretech providing persona, lines insurance products to the UK market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Shaped Thoughts to accomplish?

• Customer software solution for integrating the client's insurance platform with the insurance broker platform

SOLUTION

How did you find Shaped Thoughts?

Referral

Why did you select Shaped Thoughts over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Shaped Thoughts were assigned to this project?

16

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Shaped Thoughts was responsible for delivering the integration between the Policy Expert insurance platform and the insurance broker platform end to end - from architecture design through requirements gathering to project planning and actual software development. 

Integration piece of work between vastly differently behaving PE insurance platform and broker insurance platform was one of the two main elements of the wider work needed for this initiative to be successful. Technologies that were used by Shaped Thoughts were Java, Spring and a multitude of services from AWS.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• The project was delivered on time as per the contract with the client 
• The project was delivered on time as per the contract between the client and the insurance broker platform 
• A new sales channel was established for the client

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

From the very beginning Shaped Thoughts was very transparent with us and provided updates about project status every step of the way. Entire project was run in a lean style following the best agile practices. They have been using all communication tools we are using internally at Policy Expert to increase alignment.

What was your primary form of communication with Shaped Thoughts?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They have very senior software engineers and are working at a very impressive pace. Everything was being delivered in a predictable manner and the fact that even people who are not in strictly engineering roles have software engineering backgrounds only helped.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Shaped Thoughts could have done differently?

We as PE could have leveraged the vast experience more in the early part of the engagement, so time set aside by us to establish best practices would have been beneficial.