Core Platform Transformation, Top-25 Carriers (Cognizant)
Insurtech + off-the-shelf solution sales and delivery on Duck Creek, Guidewire, and Insurity across policy admin, claims, and distribution. Managed a $30M service-line P&L and grew it 40% over two years — 5 new clients, 4 multi-year deals, $0.5M net-new pipeline via AWS/insurtech GTM.
- $30M, +40%
- P&L
- 5 (4 multi-year)
- New clients
- $0.5M net-new
- Pipeline
Business context
US P&C carriers were mid-flight replacing legacy cores with modern platforms while insurtechs re-set expectations for speed. Carriers needed partners who could govern multi-year platform programs and bring the insurtech ecosystem to them.
The challenge
Grow a platform-transformation business across the most demanding carrier accounts in the market — where programs are multi-year, politically complex, and unforgiving of delivery failure.
Constraints
- Multi-year program horizons against quarterly P&L accountability
- Three competing platform ecosystems (Duck Creek, Guidewire, Insurity) requiring credible neutrality
- Personal, commercial, and Workers Compensation lines each with distinct regulatory and product complexity
The solution
A market-leadership model combining strategic platform partnerships, program governance for policy admin, claims, and distribution implementations, and joint go-to-market with AWS and insurtechs — building $0.5M of net-new pipeline in a year alongside the core delivery business.
Architecture
- Duck Creek, Guidewire, and Insurity core platform implementations
- Cloud migration patterns with AWS
- Insurtech integrations layered on modern cores
Architecture diagram coming soon.
Product decisions I owned
- Stay platform-neutral and own the governance layer — credibility across all three ecosystems was the differentiator carriers bought.
- Package repeatable delivery accelerators per platform rather than bespoke programs per client.
- Treat insurtech partnerships as a product portfolio with joint GTM, not ad-hoc alliances.
Lessons learned
- Core transformations fail on operating-model change, not software — governance has to own both.
- Multi-year deals are won on the second year's roadmap, not the first year's price.
- Partnership GTM only works when both sides' sellers are paid for the same win.
If I rebuilt this with AI today
AI-assisted migration — code conversion, test generation, data mapping — would compress the longest and riskiest phases of core replacement, and agentic integration would let carriers adopt insurtech capabilities without the point-to-point integration tax that stalled programs then.