Imagine a morning meeting in an insurance company’s product development team. They are holding their “daily stand-up.” One by one, employees recite what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today. The meeting feels more like a mechanical ritual of updating a manager on their status. After 15 minutes, everyone disperses and returns to their desks to continue working exactly as they did before—in isolation and focused on their individual tasks.
A month goes by. The new insurance product project is still behind schedule. The idea is still frozen, awaiting approval from the underwriting and legal departments. The “stand-ups” have changed nothing in reality—neither speed nor efficiency has increased.
On the surface, the company appears to be working according to Agile principles, but there are no results. Why is it that copying the rituals fails to deliver the promised benefits—speed, flexibility, and customer focus?
The Diagnosis: Why Does Agile in Insurance Turn into “Theater”?
- Rituals Without Principles: The company adopts the visible ceremonies of Agile (stand-ups, sprints, retrospectives) but completely ignores the fundamental principles upon which these rituals are built: rapidly delivering value to the customer, team collaboration, delegating decision-making authority, and adapting quickly to change. It’s like putting on a pilot’s uniform and expecting the plane to fly itself.
- The Underwriting and Compliance “Black Hole”: This is the insurance sector’s specific and most significant barrier. An Agile team can quickly create a prototype for a new product, but that prototype then gets stuck in a traditional, slow, waterfall-style process: analysis by the underwriting department, risk assessment, legal approval. The agile engine is bolted onto an inflexible, bureaucratic chassis.
- A Project Mindset Instead of a Product Mindset: A team is assembled temporarily for a specific goal—”to launch the new travel insurance product.” After the launch, the team is disbanded. There is no permanent team responsible for the product’s entire lifecycle, measuring its success, collecting claims data, and continuously improving it.
- Fear of Empowering Teams: True Agile requires devolving decision-making power to the teams. In the traditionally hierarchical and risk-averse insurance industry, managers are reluctant to give up control. They use the stand-up as a micromanagement tool rather than a team synchronization mechanism.
From Ceremony to Culture: Our Model for Sustainable Agile Transformation in Insurance
A real Agile transformation is not about memorizing rituals. It is a deep change in the organization’s structure, processes, and, most importantly, leadership culture. Our approach covers four main areas:
Step 1: Start with Value Streams, Not Just IT
A common mistake is to implement Agile only in the IT department. A real transformation must span the entire value-creation chain. We help the company map the complete journey of creating an insurance product—from the initial idea to policy issuance and claims processing. Based on this analysis, we create permanent, cross-functional product teams that include not only developers but also an underwriter, a claims specialist, a marketer, and a product manager. Such a team has all the necessary competencies to manage the product independently. The underwriter is no longer an external gatekeeper; they are a team member who helps create a profitable and viable product from day one.
Step 2: Building an “Agile-Compliant” Framework
This step directly addresses the underwriting and compliance bottleneck. We don’t try to bypass them; we integrate them into the process. We work with the underwriting, risk, and legal teams to create a set of pre-approved “guardrails,” or a Product Development Framework. This framework defines the boundaries within which the Agile team can operate freely and make decisions without needing approval for every minor detail. For example, the framework might define acceptable risk levels, pre-approved policy clauses, or pricing calculation models. The Agile team gains the autonomy to operate within these safe boundaries, which dramatically increases speed.
Step 3: Shifting from Project Funding to Product-Based Investment
For permanent teams to work, the funding model must also change. Instead of the company allocating a large, one-time budget for a “project,” it allocates a recurring budget to the “product team.” We implement a lean portfolio management approach. The product team is trusted with a budget for a certain period (e.g., six months). Their performance is measured not by completing a pre-defined list of features, but by achieving specific business outcomes (e.g., “a 20% increase in online policy sales” or “a 15% reduction in the average claims processing time”).
Step 4: Cultivating an Agile Leadership Culture
The final and most critical part is changing the mindset of managers. We conduct coaching and workshops for managers to help them shift from the role of “director” and “controller” to that of a “Servant Leader” and “obstacle remover.” Their new job is not to assign tasks and monitor performance, but to set a clear vision for the team, remove the bureaucratic barriers that are slowing them down, and empower them to find the best solutions. This is the most difficult but essential part of the transformation.
In Conclusion
Doing stand-ups doesn’t make you Agile, just as owning a piano doesn’t make you a pianist. Real agility in insurance is not about copying rituals; it is a deep transformation of your structure, processes, and leadership culture. We don’t just teach you Scrum ceremonies. We help you redesign your organization around customer value, create frameworks for safe and fast innovation, and instill the leadership style that will make this change sustainable.
