Story
Swiss Re is one of the world's largest reinsurers. Their internal governance platform handles high-stakes decisions, approvals, and compliance.
After 18 years, the system was hard to navigate, expensive to maintain, and painful for daily users.
I joined while development was already running. No reinsurance background, no governance experience. I had to learn a specialized domain fast, reconcile conflicting stakeholders, and modernize complex workflows without breaking habits people had built over nearly two decades.
What this project teaches
Modernize the workflow, keep the habits
Eighteen years of use means every shortcut is somebody's muscle memory. The redesign changed structure and clarity, not the sequence people rely on to approve a decision.
Migration is the project
Camille Fournier's warning holds: teams underestimate the move from old system to new, and the old one has to keep working while the new one lands. Daily approvals never stopped during the rebuild.
Learn the domain from the people who do the work
No reinsurance background on day one. The fastest route was interviewing the people who run approvals, mapping their process, and letting that map settle disagreements between stakeholders.