Hello world 👋
Hi, I’m Marc, CTO at Tempcover which means I head up the tech teams at Tempcover. We make up over half of the overall staff at Tempcover which shows you just how seriously we take the building of our own tech-stack to offer you the best possible way to buy short term car, van and motorbike insurance. We do this by putting the customer need first, building around this mantra and slowly but surely changing the way that you buy insurance (you don’t always need a full year right? 🤔).
Our teams
We believe strongly in collaboration, this enables our tech teams to build the awesome new features they deliver, quickly and to spec. We split our teams by a few business areas:
- We have a Core team that looks after the main direct to consumer car, van and motorbike short term insurance selling systems and sites.
- Next up is the App team which is responsible for our iOS and Android apps.
- We have a Partnerships team that builds and maintains integrations with third parties that we support with innovative insurance products like driveaway cover for CarGiant and Cazoo.
- We have a Digital team that looks after internal MI as well as CRM.
How we run projects
We’re big fans of the SCRUM methodology. We run 2-week sprint cycles with full engagement from techies and non-techies, ensuring we work on the most important things first and with continual feedback and approval from the relevant product owners and other stakeholders within the business.
We’ve found this to be the best approach when it comes to striking the right balance between allowing the tech team long enough to get properly stuck into a task, but not too long so as to block our agility when it comes to reacting to new opportunities that present themselves.
With all teams working to the same process, we find that we can be flexible when we need to be, moving resource between teams without people struggling to understand how things are running. The process also provides a clear focus, with the teams owning their iteration goals. 🎯
The Tech
There’s nothing more frustrating than working with hardware that slows down your progress, right? At Tempcover, our techies work on a range of high-spec machines ranging from water-cooled gaming machines to high-spec Macbooks and Dell i9s.
We’ve sold literally millions of policies through our tech-stack which is written in a range of technologies, we have APIs and a back–end written in the Microsoft .NET stack (WebAPI, .NET Core, following SOLID principles, SQL Server) and front-ends written in ReactJs, React Native for our new iOS and Android apps, WordPress as a CMS for our brochureware pages and more. As such, we have a diverse set of skills within the team which keeps everyone engaged and always learning.
Speaking of learning, all techies get a paid-up membership to Pluralsight which we all love, if you haven’t tried it then grab yourself a trial and learn something new. We’ve found that the best Tempcover techies are the ones who fit our culture and are always learning 🎓. If you want to join a growing, fast-paced, agile team of techies then get in touch, we’d love to hear from you, I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn and you can see our current vacancies on Workable.
There is, of course, one more thing that fuels techies, caffeine ☕ and calories 🍫! We have a great coffee machine and beer/drinks fridge as well as a well-stocked snack box, fruit bowls and the infamous Friday morning sandwich to look forward to!
There’s also a pool table and arcade machine for you to relax and enjoy during the day.
Until next time
So that’s us! This is my first tech blog which hopefully introduces our tech team and gives you a feel for how we bring the Tech to InsurTech at Tempcover, in future posts we’ll dig a little deeper into our processes, tools and teams to give a real insight into the ever-improving tech-stack that we build and maintain as well as our awesome teams.
[Cross-posted on Medium here]
