Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer — Architecture Renewal

Renewing an architecture while it carries the business

Insurance technology carries policies, claims, billing and reinsurance recoveries that cannot pause while someone redraws the diagram. Architecture renewal in that setting is less like rebuilding a house than replacing its beams while people live in it. The Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer has to choose which dependencies to reduce first, whether on a vendor, a legacy platform, a single team or a single individual, and how to do it while product teams keep shipping what underwriters and claims handlers need.

The useful discipline is to treat every dependency as a cost with an owner. Some are worth keeping: a stable core system that is merely old may be cheaper to wrap than to replace. Others quietly tax every change made around them, and those are where renewal pays for itself.

The executive authority behind the choices

Under the Group Chief Executive Officer, you will set how technology decisions are made and how far country technology leads can go before a decision comes to the centre. You will choose the evidence on which spending, capacity and control are governed, and decide which inherited technology commitments proceed, which pause and which stop. You will stop any plan that slides cost or risk onto a team that never agreed to own it, and decline investment whose case is silent on its users, its dependencies or what could go wrong. You will approve the technology leadership line-up and the route by which problems rise, and broker agreement between the Group Chief Executive Officer and the heads of underwriting and claims before any spending is locked in.

The arc of the 24 months

In the first ninety days, target architecture choices should be agreed against a measured baseline of dependency, and every inherited platform commitment should have an accountable owner. Around month nine, the components that create the most dependency should be on an exit path that is funded rather than merely drawn, while product delivery keeps to its agreed cadence. By month 24 the renewal should be delivered, dependency demonstrably lower, and product and technology governance held by leaders who will carry it after you.

Calm on a platform that cannot stop

You have led product and technology where the platform could not go dark, in a business with at least $440 million of revenue and 800 or more people, active in seven countries or more. Your experience of professionalisation, digital transformation and crisis response will be weighed, the last because a renewal programme will meet incidents, and how you behave in one says a great deal about how you will behave in the months between them. Risk judgement at level 4 sits alongside level-3 capability in data and AI governance, in scalable architecture and in product delivery. Be ready to describe a well-liked programme you shut down, what persuaded you, and which engineers and budget it freed.

Chief executive, risk chair, executives, directors

The Group Chief Executive Officer holds the opening conversation, by video and in confidence, in week one. Week three is given to the Risk Committee Chair, who will examine your architecture choices as risk decisions. By week five you will be meeting, in person, executives who each lead a function, and in week seven the board as a whole. Expect a written note from us within four working days of each stage.