A Leading Insurance Comparison Provider
One of the UK's best-known price-comparison brands, helping millions of customers compare and buy insurance every year.
Executive Summary
Our client set out to reinvent the heart of its customer experience: the quote-and-purchase journey. As part of a company-wide strategic programme, the goal was to move from a rigid and hard-to-change journey to a flexible configuration-driven platform. One that could support multiple products, adapt quickly to a fast-moving market and get the best possible price in front of customers faster.
amarti was engaged to lead a pivotal squad at the centre of that programme. We embedded a Technical Programme Manager to own delivery, align a web of interdependent teams, and ship new customer-facing components into production. Along the way we navigated a significant mid-flight change in technical direction and considerable turnover in the client's leadership team. We held the programme steady, re-planned at pace, and handed back a better-aligned delivery operation than we found.
The Challenge
The programme had an ambitious mission: to give customers the simplest possible experience by recognising them during their quote journey and pre-filling their answers, reducing friction and increasing speed to market. Delivering it meant solving several problems at once:
- A rigid journey. The existing purchase experience was difficult and slow to change. The vision was a configuration-driven platform, where each part of the customer journey could be broken down into small, reusable, configurable components, enabling a highly customisable experience across multiple products while reducing operating cost.
- A tightly-coupled delivery model. The new platform depended on close choreography between multiple squads: front-end teams, a back-end-for-front-end layer, and downstream data and quoting systems. Any misalignment risked blocking everyone.
- An immovable deadline. The programme was working towards a first MVP launch to customers against a fixed date, putting real pressure on scope and sequencing.
- A shifting landscape. Leadership and direction changed during the engagement, requiring the delivery approach to flex without losing momentum.
Approach
Set-Up
- We embedded an experienced amarti Technical Programme Manager directly into the programme to lead a back-end-for-front-end (BFF) squad, the layer that sat between the customer-facing journey (question set, summary and results pages) and downstream systems such as customer data.
- Rather than working at arm's length, we became part of the client's team, getting under the skin of the programme to build relationships across squads and take ownership of outcomes rather than tasks.
- We quickly mapped the key people and dependencies so the squad understood exactly who it relied on, and who relied on it.
Ways of Working
- We ran an agile delivery cadence with clear quarterly objectives, translating the programme's half-yearly MVP goal into achievable squad-level targets.
- We put structured collaboration in place where it was missing, establishing regular cross-squad refinement sessions with the front-end teams so dependencies surfaced early and teams stopped blocking one another.
- We published clear and visible roadmaps so upstream and downstream teams could align around a shared plan and socialise it with stakeholders.
Governance & Tracking
- We built a regular reporting rhythm covering progress, challenges, wins and asks, keeping stakeholders aligned and confident throughout.
- We drove quarterly planning and roadmap socialisation, giving stakeholders a clear line of sight from day-to-day delivery to the programme's strategic goals.
- As direction and priorities shifted, we kept governance tight, continually re-baselining scope so the plan stayed realistic and the team stayed focused on what mattered most for launch.
Delivery
Working at the centre of the programme, our squad took new capability all the way through to production:
- First live component on the results page: an interstitial showing a live quote count, served through the BFF layer. This was the first time a results-page component had run in production, a significant milestone for the programme.
- A new design system, safely rolled out: we delivered the summary page on the client's new design system and built a versioning mechanism that let the business switch between the new and existing design systems, de-risking the rollout.
- Integration with the question-set manager: enabling the front-end team to build out the customer question set dynamically.
- Live-data foundations: integrating a proof-of-concept with the quoting system (including an annual/monthly toggle) so the results page could move from mock data toward live, customer-ready data.
- A single-page question set with server-side validation, scoped and sequenced as the core of the first customer MVP.
Navigating Change
Part-way through the programme, the client changed technical direction, shifting away from a granular, configuration-driven model towards a front-end that did more of the heavy lifting. Changes of this size can derail a delivery team. Ours turned it around in 48 hours: stopping work that was no longer needed, starting what was, and re-planning the entire backlog around the new approach, all while the client's engineering manager was on leave.
The engagement also spanned considerable change on the client side, including turnover across product and technology leadership. Throughout, amarti provided continuity and a steady hand, keeping delivery moving and knowledge in the room even as people around us changed.
When our part of the programme concluded, we delivered a full, structured handover to the client's engineering and product leadership, leaving the team well-positioned to carry the work forward. Feedback on the engagement was overwhelmingly positive.
Results & Outcomes
- Delivered the first production components of a modern, reusable purchase journey, proving out the configuration-driven approach on real customer-facing pages.
- Took a critical squad from fragmented and dependency-blocked to aligned and predictable, through clear roadmaps and cross-team ways of working.
- Absorbed a major change in direction without losing momentum, re-planning an entire backlog in 48 hours.
- Provided leadership continuity through a period of significant client-side change, and handed back a stronger delivery operation.
Measuring Success
Success was measured against the programme's own goals: getting new, reusable components live on the customer journey, building the cross-team alignment needed to sustain delivery, and keeping the MVP on track against a fixed deadline. amarti's contribution was recognised well beyond the squad. Our Technical Programme Manager was invited to share "How to define KPIs for Platform products", using the programme as a worked example, with the wider technical programme management community.
Let's Work Together
Make us the catalyst in your next digital transformation. We would love to hear from you.