⚠️ Warning
TL;DR
and more to personal mumbling. 😅Background
In Jan 2017, joined a Fintech or Insuretech startup that focuses on general/motor insurance specifically for the Malaysian market.
I got hired via JobStreet as developer lead for the motor insurance product and integration with various insurance companies (insurers). At that time, the current team is 3 Hooman 🐱 excluding myself, 1 designer, 2 full-stack developers. Funded by angel investors and stakeholders from an insurance agency, this startup seems like a head start, since it has the network, fund, solid product idea (compulsory insurance product for Malaysia vehicle road tax), team and required resources.
The First 3 months studied the tech stacks, the product specs, bonding with stakeholders and team, the industry knowledge from various experts, and meeting with various insurers to discuss the integration and collaboration. In the beginning, everything seems promising.
Phase 1 — Tech stacks
We’re using Codeigniter + jQuery + SQL at that time, a monolithic MVC architecture, know many bragging about decoupled micro-service (Ms) and MERN stacks, but Codeigniter have been there for some time within this startup and have a solid foundation like user auth, forms and logic.
Crucial decision
During meeting with various insurers, stakeholders, industry experts and teams, crucial decisions are filtered down to a few, whether we go for:
- manual forms (provided by the insurer)
- case submission via FTP
- or API integration.
Each option has its own pro & con and due to resources constraints ( always happen to startups, so prioritisation is important ) we only able to focus on 1 option at a time. After management struggling for few months and compare various competitors products, we decided to prioritise insurer API integration with manual forms. ( API integration get backfire 🔥 in later phase, will tell more on this later )
Phase 1 — Development
After 5,6 months of working closely with the insurer, stakeholder, management, marketing and tech team, we’re proud to announce the first integration with a local insurer with a red logo and their boss called Tony. The process is not that easy as the insurer always has other priorities than this integration.
At least, the business can kickstart and run with the main product of motor insurance, the member/agent dashboard for members to check for policies, reward points and an admin dashboard to let HQ admin and operation handle the daily transaction.
Sales are coming in, the backlog is increasing due to marketing & operation feedback, we’re lack resources to do feature validation for each major request. Everything is at a fast pace and fulfilling the startup mantra of running fast, fail fast and fix fast. And we believe this is the healthy sign of a startup, Well, the reality is always hiding at the corner and waiting to slap your face hard. 😁💁♂️
The good things
From the cultural perspective, we’re still a healthy team as we are open to feedback and issues internally, transparency is key. We open discussion about any work or personal issues. The management is listening to co-worker feedback and we’re listening to customer feedback too to make the insurance renewal flow less painful. Everyone stays on the same track and moves.
The bad things
After go-live for minimum viable product (MVP) version, and several months of endless standup, meetings, fighting the long list of backlog and new features from marketing, operations and stakeholders. Like other startups, the team is near burnt out and stagnant. Opt for new hiring but often get rejected from management and stakeholders diplomatically due to the belief of “Startup should accomplish more with fewer people.”
What frustrates the dev team more is that the coverage of product knowledge and support for marketing side as marketing personnel lack of knowledge to operate and resolve the issues arise especially out of office hour. Again the quote kick in “Startup should accomplish more with fewer people.” The tech team is very keen and ready to provide any written resources/references, but still, the same issues ( unresolvable ) keep repeating by marketing. ( maybe I should write a post about tech vs marketing )
Next
When near to burnt out, to stay in the game, we decided to change the way we do things, talk more in the next post, stay tuned.
