Launching a revenue-generating insurance product in 7 weeks
With car ownership dropping in multiple markets, and millennials favoring ride-sharing apps like Uber & Zipcar, FTSE 100 Insurer Admiral wanted to create a new offering reducing the minimum time commitment for auto insurance from one year, to one hour.
The Innovator's Dilemma
Though the existing IT team had the technology and skills to support 4 million existing customers, they lacked the resources & expertise to build a new product that could be quickly integrated into their legacy systems.
A New Approach
To close the gap, Admiral created an internal start-up, called Veygo. They wanted this company to be an experiment not just in terms of product, but also specific technologies (open-source and cloud) and methodologies (such as Lean & Agile). This team would embody tech and organizational management best practices.
This is where Theodo came in.
Veygo partnered with Theodo to grow their in-house capabilities and complete the transition to being a fully standalone team.
Start Small To Go Fast
We started with a team of five: three Theodo full-stack engineers, an Agile coach, all led by the head of the business unit. By deeply evaluating the necessity of every feature request and utilizing our proprietary technology, we accelerated the go to market and released the first version in seven weeks.
Scale and Iterate
Releasing quickly, and iterating rapidly based on real customer data allowed us to double the first month's revenue targets. With growing confidence in the product and methodology, we then helped Veygo scale through efficient technical choices and through the recruitment of exceptional new hires, who we also trained in the new technologies.
Our use of React & React Native as well as Django, made the newly-created roles particularly attractive despite the limited candidate pool in the companies headquarters of Cardiff, Wales. With a decade of experience in recruiting world-class engineers, we first helped Veygo with their sourcing of candidates and assessment of their skill level with technical interviews. Once we on-boarded the team, paired programming, and one-on-one coaching allowed us to address knowledge gaps and level up their new hires rapidly.
As the team continued to scale, we helped recruit & train in-house Agile Coaches to ensure that the Agile & Lean methodologies which had helped drive the project's success.
Transition
As Veygo’s in-house capabilities grew and we helped them complete the transition to being a fully standalone team. Utilizing our skills transfer assessment tool provided safeguards that guaranteed complete knowledge transfer.
Head of Veygo
Head of Veygo
With the power of our go-to-market methodology, we were able to launch and iterate in record time, proving the market fit for this innovative product.
The backing of the wider organization enabled Theodo to help Veygo scale without sacrificing speed.
With the success of the project, Admiral plc turned to Theodo for subsequent new product launches: three across insurance and one in car finance.
The Numbers
• First product shipped in 7 weeks
• First year's revenue target doubled
• Tech team grew from 0 to 20
• Every new developer fully trained in React, React Native & Django
• Veygo team awarded “In House App team 2018”, UK App Awards
Approved by IT Departments, Loved By Developers
Our first challenge was to select a backend technology that could meet the technical standards of their current IT department while being dev-friendly enough to allow the company to recruit within their limited candidate pool.
We also built the web product with a mobile-first approach, in a way that would allow for the easy creation of a mobile app if the website found its market.
Developing with React, a JavaScript frontend library maintained by Facebook, we created a dynamic and blazing-fast user interface that our end-users loved. We then developed a mobile application using React Native, which allowed us to reuse some of the website's code for the apps. Both types of application — iOS and Android — had a shared codebase that dramatically reduced development time and cost.
