,
2 min read

Unqork Create 2022 | Transforming Life & Annuity Insurance

FOXO’s Tyler Danielson, CTO, and Taylor Fay, Product Management Lead, discuss the ways codeless helps build agility into the DNA of their company. 

At Unqork Create 2022, Unqork’s Chandresh Kothari welcomed two leaders from insurance innovator FOXO—Tyler Danielson, CTO, and Taylor Fay, Product Management Lead—to discuss the ways the insurer uses Unqork’s Codeless-as-a-Service to bring high-quality, complex, and flexible products to market quickly. 

“We actually built majority of the life insurance platform, which includes the policy administration and even some reinsurance administration, in about six months,” said Danielson. 

“We wanted to focus on our core workflows for users and make sure that we could get those automated and fully digital quickly,” added Fay. “Unqork was able to make that possible for us.” 

Rapidly increasing developer productivity

Very quickly Danielson was able to hire and train a team to start working on Unqork. And they were building sophisticated applications at speed within weeks.

“Our Unqork developers just out of bootcamp were doing stuff that I as a developer couldn’t do in half the time. It was really unbelievable,” said Danielson. “And they were extremely proud of the work they were doing, and the culture just built from there. So, it was really powerful.” 

“With one team we built an entire life insurance platform—policy, administration dashboard for the customers, the application, and the quoting—all in about six months,” added Danielson. “That’s pretty amazing to me—and faster than I could have ever done in any other tool, including React, even if I had all senior folks.”

Aligning business and tech teams

Because the Unqork platform is so intuitive, it also helped tech and business teams collaborate more effectively, which further accelerated development and also ensure that solutions met the needs of customers and the business. 

“With Unqork, our product managers are better able to understand the development process on a sprint by sprint basis and even watch or be involved in that process,” said Fay. “Unqork gets us closer to like a truly cross-functional team. And I think that’s really powerful, especially when you’re in the concept phase of a project.” 

In fact, product managers have actually gotten hands-on and learned their way around the Unqork platform themselves. 

“We had all of our PMs do the Unqork training too, and that allowed them to understand the effort that was going into a lot of it,” explained Danielson. “So, then when the developers would come in and say, ‘Hey, this is what it’s gonna take,’ there was clarity there on what that meant.” 

“We were able to leverage Unqork for those traditionally difficult things in insurance that other systems don’t have, to be honest,” he added. 

Take a self-guided tour of Unqork’s Codeless-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform

Take the tour!