With their offering they aimed to reduce the minimum auto insurance time commitment from one year, to one hour. Though the existing IT team had the technology and skills to support 4 million existing customers, they lacked the resources & expertise to build a new product that could be quickly integrated into their legacy systems.
They wanted this company to be an experiment not just in terms of product, but also specific technologies (open-source and cloud) and methodologies (such as Lean & Agile). This team would embody best practices not just for tech, but for organizational management as well.
We started with a team of five: three Theodo full-stack engineers and an Agile coach, all led by the head of the business unit. By deeply evaluating the necessity of every feature request utilising our proprietary technology we accelerated the go to market and released the first version inside seven weeks.
Releasing quickly, and iterating rapidly based on real customer data allowed us to double the first month's revenue targets. With growing confidence in the product and methodology, we were then able to help Veygo scale through efficient technical choices and through the recruitment of exceptional new hires.
Our use of React & React Native as well as Django, made the newly-created roles particularly attractive despite the limited candidate pool in the company's headquarters of Cardiff, Wales.
With a decade of experience in recruiting world-class engineers we first helped Veygo with their sourcing of candidates and assessment of their skill level with technical interviews. Once we on-boarded the team, paired programming and one-on-one coaching allowed us to address knowledge gaps and level up their new hires rapidly.
As the team continued to scale we helped recruit & train in-house Agile Coaches to ensure that the Agile & Lean methodologies which had helped drive the projects success would persist.
Our first challenge was to select a backend technology that could meet the technical standards of their current IT department while being dev-friendly enough to allow the company to recruit within their limited candidate pool.
We also built the web product with a mobile-first approach, in a way that would allow for the easy creation of a mobile app if the website found its market.
Developing with React, a JavaScript frontend library maintained by Facebook, we created a dynamic and blazing-fast user interface that our end-users loved. We then developed a mobile application using React Native, which allowed us to reuse some of the code of the website for both the iOS and Android mobile applications, dramatically reducing development time and cost.
The backing of the wider organization enabled Theodo to help Veygo scale without sacrificing speed. With the success of the project, Admiral plc turned to Theodo for subsequent new product launches: three across insurance and one in car finance.
"We could not create this new product within our existing traditional IT structures. I knew we had to create a team separate from Admiral’s core structure and operations Theodo has been a great partner on this journey, helping us meet our first key milestone, and ensuring that Veygo was, is, and remains agile."
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