BTP Underwriting

Context

Underwriting determines whether financial risk is accepted, modified, or declined. Small interaction errors, ambiguous states, or unclear criteria can materially impact approval outcomes, review timelines, and business exposure. Within enterprise insurance platforms, these workflows are data-dense, highly procedural, and sensitive to edge cases.

A new Business Technology Platform (BTP) product was initiated to create a dedicated underwriting workspace and modernize an existing experience already in use. Due to aggressive timelines and delivery risk, a small senior design team was assembled to accelerate execution and reduce uncertainty early.

The workflows relied on conditional logic, state-dependent inputs, and risk-based decision paths, making early validation critical before engineering implementation.

Design Challenges

• The workflow changed based on risk inputs and prior selections, which made it hard to fully validate edge cases using static designs alone
• Decision paths depended on how risk signals and required information were interpreted.
• Different input combinations affected how applications progressed through review and downstream decision states.
• Early validation of edge cases was necessary to reduce downstream implementation risk.

Role & Contribution

I focused on clarifying complex underwriting workflows and validating conditional decision paths before engineering implementation.

The work emphasized speed, clarity, and feasibility, supporting fast alignment across product, design, and engineering.

• Rapid exploration and validation of underwriting workflows
• Early feasibility assessment in collaboration with engineering
• Concrete interactive artifacts to support product decision-making
• Targeted feedback from a small group of domain users

Prototyping as a Product Tool

Given the compressed timeline, prototyping served as a primary tool for reducing ambiguity and accelerating decisions rather than producing static design specifications.

Interactive prototypes were built to simulate real underwriting states and conditional logic, allowing the team to test how decision paths behaved across different scenarios.

• Boolean variables to model state changes and conditional logic
• Dynamic panels and selection states reflecting real underwriting scenarios

Outcome

The prototypes enabled faster alignment across product, design, and engineering, surfacing technical considerations and usability issues earlier than traditional handoff approaches.

This approach reduced delivery risk and supported more confident decision-making as the product progressed toward implementation.

It also improved clarity around how risk states and documentation requirements were represented across the experience.