Giving an AI-first insurance platform a shared product direction.

Established shared product and experience foundations across five delivery pods, giving teams and AI a common reference for what to build.

At a Glance

AI-enabled product transformation 9-person UX/UI team Five delivery pods Cross-functional governance

Project Overview

Client: Insurity, through Artizent (formerly Nous)
Domain: Enterprise property and casualty insurance technology
Delivery context: Two applications, 53 capabilities, and approximately 60 contributors across the broader delivery environment
Status: Platform in active development

Leadership & Influence

Expanded and led a team of five UX designers and four UI developers, organizing the team around a more efficient delivery process and retaining final design approval responsibility.
Provided cross-functional leadership across product, engineering, QA, and delivery, aligning product and insurance-domain decisions around shared customer goals and workflows. Influenced product direction, staffing, roadmap decisions, and client alignment.
Established foundations for accountable review and preservation of product decisions while delivery continued.

Challenge

Development was underway before customer understanding, product strategy, and end-to-end workflows had converged. The program could generate functional output, but lacked a shared basis for deciding whether it was the right product.

Missing decisions became generated behavior. AI filled gaps that needed customer context and accountable human judgment.
Teams could build different interpretations. The same requirements did not guarantee shared workflows, language, or experience.
Corrections consumed the apparent time savings. Accepted decisions could be lost between specifications, prototypes, and implementation.

The challenge was to establish shared product direction and decision accountability while delivery kept moving.

Objectives

Insurity’s vision was to put insurance-product creation in the hands of the domain experts responsible for those products—enabling them to configure and launch offerings without relying on IT to translate every decision into the system.

Turn the vision into shared product direction. Align product, domain, experience, and engineering leaders around what to build and which decisions needed resolution.
Create one product from fragmented capabilities. Align teams and applications around a coherent customer proposition.
Turn AI speed into dependable progress. Preserve decisions and control rework as delivery scales.
Build a capability the organization can sustain. Establish shared practices, accountability, and reusable foundations for ongoing client ownership.

A commercial airplane being assembled while already flying

Unfinished foundation. Delivery was underway before product direction and customer understanding had converged.

A professional forcing an oversized square block into a smaller round opening

Output without dependable progress. Correcting generated behavior consumed the apparent time savings.

A hand completing the unfinished blueprint of an aircraft

Shared direction and accountability. Teams needed a common product foundation and clear ownership of unresolved decisions.

Approach

Formalize how teams turn requirements into product decisions. Established a shared sequence: collect business requirements, generate a functional specification, prototype, review and refine with Product, update the specification, and use it for AI-assisted code generation. The prototype provides a human validation surface; the updated functional specification becomes the authoritative input for implementation. I documented the process for client stakeholder review and feedback.
Put the workflow into practice through FSD Studio. Helped conceive, architect, build, and operationalize the tool, connecting AI-assisted specification generation with software validation, decision tracking, and human review.
Keep executive oversight connected to product decisions. Documented key decisions and reviewed progress in weekly executive meetings, making refinements and scope changes visible as stakeholders assessed whether the work remained on track.
Make approved direction usable by teams and AI. Documented product context, specifications, prototypes, and design-system foundations as shared delivery inputs, giving subsequent work a reference grounded in reviewed product decisions.

Make technical capabilities understandable as insurance work.

Engineering had progressed before the experience specification was available, leaving navigation organized around technical components rather than recognizable user tasks. With limited resources and a demo approaching, I stepped in to bridge the gap between the existing implementation and the intended experience.

I developed a hybrid navigation model that regrouped capabilities around tenant setup, product setup, and administration—providing a practical direction for the upcoming demo. The decision balanced what engineering had already built with the domain-expert vision: people needed to recognize the work they were trying to do, rather than interpret the system’s technical structure.

Diagram showing business intent, customer evidence, people, workflows, requirements, and experience-system inputs forming a governed Experience Layer

A shared product foundation. Documented customer context and experience standards gave teams a common reference.

Diagram showing the Experience Brief, Product Brief, personas, design system, and business requirements converging in FSD Studio to produce a governed functional specification

A repeatable decision process. Human prototype review and updated specifications carried approved product decisions into AI-assisted implementation.

Annotated comparison showing a complex system hierarchy, a regrouped transition state, and a recommended model that preserves routes through simplified global navigation and contextual tabs

A practical response to parallel development. The hybrid navigation regrouped technical capabilities around recognizable user tasks.

Progress and foundations established

Shared product and experience foundations are in use across five delivery pods. The operating model was formally adopted and is in use in participating pods. Consistent adoption of the complete process across the broader development organization remains uneven.

Approximately 40 governed specifications put the foundations to work. Shared customer context and experience standards became inputs to specifications across the delivery effort.
Product decisions documented for repeatable AI-assisted delivery. Approved direction, prototype refinements, and reusable patterns became shared inputs, reducing what teams and AI were left to interpret independently.
A reusable framework delivered for ongoing client use. My team documented product context, patterns, decisions, and working practices for Insurity to maintain and extend.

The platform is in active development. Shared foundations provide a basis for broader process adoption and the next stage: enabling domain experts to create insurance products and equipping Insurity to maintain and extend the framework. Customer and business outcomes will need to be evaluated as the platform moves into use.