Coding for Instant Life Insurance at Ethos
Cole Hudson, Software Engineer
Introduction
As a software engineer at Ethos Life, I am part of a team of highly driven product managers, designers, analysts, marketers, salespeople, fellow engineers, and countless others who help to make online life insurance easy, affordable, and accessible. We have teams all around the world working together from different time zones throughout the day and night. On a typical day, cross-collaboration takes place across a multitude of these teams as we work to support each other in our mission to protect the next million families at Ethos. In this article, I hope to give you a peek behind the scenes into what day-to-day life is like working on one of these teams.
Inside the work bag
Over the past few years at Ethos, I have primarily worked on the frontend side of our landing pages and policy application web-app. The teams I have worked for are usually focused on fast-paced and data-driven experimentation, where we iterate on user interfaces to provide customers with a more educational, efficient, and enjoyable website experience. Increasing our conversion rates along the way also means we can serve more families.
On the frontend, some of the technologies in our stack include:
Some of the tools we use are:
Aside from the applications installed on our computers to make engineering possible, it’s important to also recognize the other individuals playing their role in this living tech ecosphere we call a start-up.
Everyone has a role; that’s how we roll
Software engineers alone do not make a web experience come to life.
- There are wonderful infrastructure, security, IT, testing, and data teams that support our endeavors in programming our web applications in a scalable, secure, quality-assured, and developer-friendly environment.
- Our analysts are always hard at work building experiment dashboards to identify even the smallest incremental wins from A/B testing across our funnel.
- The technical program and product managers drive us towards our goals, helping to align the initiatives of their teams with our company-wide objectives and key results.
- Designers create eye-catching visuals that we implement using our bespoke internal design system.
- Our enterprise and partnerships teams work with 3rd party agents and agencies, to make the Ethos products more attainable outside of the direct-to-consumer market.
- Consumer sales, policy administration, and customer experience team members assist customers with securing the right coverage and keeping them happy after a sale is made.
- The underwriting, actuarial and legal folks make sure we can offer our users consistently low prices with a high degree of accuracy and authenticity.
- Leadership and our people team (HR) keep the teams focused on our north star goals while ensuring a work-life balance is not left by the wayside.
It’s all of these different people coming together that allows Ethos to offer an array of online products that are redefining the life insurance market for the 21st century. One team, one dream.
Having top fun each sprint
At the present, my time at Ethos is mostly spent working within the top-of-funnel team, hence we call ourselves “top-fun” for short (it’s possible our team was formed around the recent release date of a certain Tom Cruise movie). Fun puns aside, we usually work in 1 to 2-week sprints, depending on quarterly objectives, team size, and complexity of the work at hand. We’re not afraid to revise our processes and procedures to maintain optimal momentum, which is why we’ve experimented with different sprint lengths. We have a backlog like many teams in tech do and our product team works to define tasks for the engineers, designers, and analysts ahead of each sprint.
From start to finish, my work in a sprint might look something like this:
- Engineers often take turns leading chunks of work we call initiatives. I’ll either lead an initiative or pair with someone who is leading.
- Scope the work ahead of each sprint, to estimate the effort and labor cost involved.
- G3t c0d1ng!
- After feature development takes place, the product and design team members review the engineer’s work, while the testing team ensures that we didn’t break anything.
- When stakeholders have all signed off on any given initiative, we ship it! We like to ship fast and often, valuing rapid iteration to support constant A/B experimentation.
- When an experiment has run its course, the goal is that our team is data-informed to make a baselining decision for the feature that was tested. We remove the experimentation code and either keep the control version of a feature or implement the winning treatment.
Inevitable challenges do arise, and what fun would programming be without them? When faced with things like low confidence in experiment results, issues with deployment, bugs that slipped through the cracks, or miscommunications amongst team members, at Ethos, we aim to resolve them by embracing some of our core values.
We are empowered to speak our minds and hold discourse with strong opinions that are loosely held, which allows for amicable consensus to be reached efficiently. Striving to combine this with first-principles thinking allows us to confront unknowns with a methodical strategy, founded on examining what we already know.
We are encouraged to define project requirements in a detailed manner and brainstorm with others, to include various perspectives on the problem being solved. This process can help to alleviate the pressure of potential challenges before they might arise later in the development process.
Keeping the end in mind
Continuous improvement and growth in the way we operate as a technology company are integral stops along the journey to creating a suite of life insurance products and tools, from which our customers can benefit.
Our team ensures we hold retrospective meetings on a recurring basis to identify ways in which we can increase our velocity, solidify our codebase and continue to innovate our online presence. Leaving these meetings with actionable items for the next cycle of work allows us to hold ourselves accountable to the learnings we make year-round. Knowing that there’s always room to improve and grow, not only as a company but as individuals, is something I truly believe to be a key driving motivator in showing up and taking the small steps first, even when the end goal(s) can seem ambitious, daunting and out of reach.
Each day we show up at Ethos with the primary goal of serving our families. The things we achieve as a team can only come to fruition through demonstrating a vigorous intent to act with integrity. Remembering this with each contribution we make to the team and focusing on delighting our customers with an exemplary life insurance experience, can mean they are supported in some of their greatest times of need.
Cole joined Ethos in April 2019 as a freelance contractor helping to build their first Content Management System. He has since joined as a full-time software engineer working primarily on growth and experimentation projects. When Cole isn’t coding at Ethos, he enjoys snowboarding, playing soccer, hiking, and camping. Interested in joining Cole’s team? Learn more about our career opportunities here.
