How Next Insurance Broke Its Whole Lifecycle Into Agent Skills

The useful part

What an agentic development lifecycle looks like when it is actually running Shay Mandel has spent his career on the boundary between engineering and product. A developer at heart, as he puts it, who also likes to see big systems: how we impact customers, how we improve processes. He joined Next Insurance more than seven years ago, when it was quite a small company that then grew almost a hundred percent every year in revenue until it was acquired.

How it works

• They do small business insurance: think about a technician who comes to your house and needs general liability, and workers comp if he has an employee.
• They provide all these kinds of coverages digitally, so you can just go online and create a policy with no need for an agent.
• Across engineering, product management and insurance product, that's around two hundred people building the product.
• For the last three or four months those two hundred people have been moving the product development lifecycle onto agents.
• So that's what this is: his account of what they broke into skills, where humans still decide, what the agents get wrong, and what they deliberately left alone.

What to take from it

My questions are kept where they moved the conversation, and the full episode is linked at the end.