Things in tech change quickly. So when a certain tool or process endures for decades, it has to be good.
Really good.
Take the agile methodology, which has enabled teams to concentrate on building the best products possible for more than 20 years. Tech leaders have long favored agile hallmarks to aid in continuous development and quick iteration, like sprint planning, scrums and retrospectives.
Take Harneet Kalra, the director of program management for life insurance startup Ethos Life. His team has implemented a lean-agile methodology, which draws on key agile principles to enable his team to focus on building and tweaking products fast. And because the Ethos Life teams are working on several different products, there’s no need for every team to employ the same exact processes if they aren’t useful to what they’re specifically working on.
To him, it’s a big part of what makes Ethos Life stand out in the competitive insurance industry.
“As a fast-growing startup, we need to make quick decisions and iterate,” Kalra said. “Velocity is our key differentiator, so we need to implement processes that act as a force multiplier to speed and empower our teams, rather than hinder them.”
To learn more about how Ethos Life has structured its tech teams, Built In Austin connected with Kalra. He took us through why certain agile principles have helped drive development, teamwork and streamlined workflows — and why that’s made life better for engineers and product managers at the growing startup.
Tell us a bit about how your team uses the agile methodology?
At Ethos, we have implemented a lean-agile methodology, which has been critical in driving velocity for our teams. This structure includes an iterative software development process using scrum, including bi-weekly sprint prioritizations, grooming and sprint planning with sprint demos, and retrospectives. This empowers teams to organize themselves, acknowledge the team’s work and build functional software.
Agile provides a framework that can be applied when the products being built are elastic enough to respond quickly. At Ethos, our product suite is divided into three pillars: consumer-facing applications that enable users to apply for life insurance; an insurance platform that encompasses our back-end infrastructure, underwriting engine and the data infrastructure empowering our products; and a partnership platform with a suite of applications to serve life insurance agents.
We use scrum as a methodology across all three pillars, but due to the iterative nature of our work, it’s implemented with different flavors depending on the size of products, features or experiments being built. This enables us to deliver software that stays close to the user’s needs. We also showcase teamwork in our companywide product demos to raise awareness and gather feedback on what we are building.
We’ve implemented a Scrum framework that emphasizes decision-making at the team level.”
How do you ensure agile principles are properly implemented so that they help developers rather than hinder them?
We’ve implemented a Scrum framework that emphasizes decision-making at the team level. This allows teams to implement the framework in the most suitable way, and lets the teams use the right ceremonies and processes based on their needs. We also have dedicated technical program managers for over 10 geographically distributed teams to drive scrum processes, break up silos, encourage communication and foster cross-team collaboration.
Additionally, product managers drive product requirements by focusing on customers. The feedback from teams are actively collected and incorporated to update processes. This ensures that our processes and tools support the developers’ efforts.
