About FWD Group
FWD Group is a pan-Asian life and health insurance business with more than 12 million customers across 10 markets, including some of the fastest-growing insurance markets in the world. The company was established in 2013 and is focused on changing the way people feel about insurance. FWD’s customer-led and digitally enabled approach aims to deliver innovative propositions, easy-to-understand products and a simpler insurance experience.
For more information, please visit www.fwd.com
For more information about FWD Hong Kong, please visit www.fwd.com.hk/.
PURPOSE
The Group Platforms team is responsible for identifying, defining, and managing digital product platforms and technologies to fulfil business objectives.
The Group Platforms team operates across FWD Group to:
- Collaborate with functions to drive the design conceptualisation and development of new business platforms, provide digital product platform management and partner digital solutions.
- Evolve digital product platform development roadmaps and collaborate on solution design to achieve optimal business outcomes.
KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES
Detailed job responsibilities are to lead the digital product management and delivery of digital platform solutions with the initial focus on leading a Regional Web Digital Platform
Strategy
- Lead and manage digital platform with a team including Business Analysts, Engineers and UI/UX Designers to solve complex user needs and pain points focusing on roadmap defining the North star metrics that align with Group Digital Commerce
- Setup a roadmap by aligning with the vision and strategy of digital platform and lead platform management to keep pursuing the platform vision
Design
- Lead multiple workstreams for customer facing applications and lead the execution on platform design through extracting business priorities and fulfilling business needs at both the regional and market level while engage with stakeholders
- Demonstrate the expertise at applying design thinking methodologies towards the insights gathering of the platform
- Lead Dev squad together with UX/UI designers to deliver the best user journeys in the digital platform for our customers at both regional level and country level
- Responsibly for ensuring platform is designed to support scalability, reliability, and efficient maintainability.
- Amplify Agile practices through design and execution efforts.
- Ability to gather and document complex user and technical requirements, translate these to multiple business rules and logic specifications, organized within the scrum framework, and able to lead and execute with wider/cross functional technical development teams, and market QA teams
Development
- Lead the product management and execution of the digital platform through extracting business priorities and fulfilling business needs at the regional level
- Arrange product specs/stories for major platform delivery with a high standard of experience and application of the agile software delivery framework.
- Able to mentor colleagues and team members on the Scrum environment and process.
- Technically savvy to work closely with developers, understanding their technical capabilities and constraints
- Partner technology solutions delivery and business functional teams to embed technologies to support business efficiencies
- Partner stakeholders to manage platforms roadmaps alongside target business goals.
Operations
- Ensure co-ordinated design, development and deployment plans with business functions and technology solutions delivery teams.
- Support the operationalization of platform capabilities and best practices consistent with company vision and business goals.
- Strong Executor: Strongly oriented towards results. Embraces an inner drive that overcomes obstacles and propels through to the finish line of the project delivery while maintaining impeccable quality and integrity
- Able to dive deep and stay in touch with the details of the expected Group/Country business metrics and the technology.
- Assess CX feedback and prioritize quick fix optimizations and longer-term strategic fixes
- Manage the Group/ country backlog to fulfil the Digital platform business strategy and yearly and quarterly roadmaps
- Support appropriate decisions to ensure digital platforms are planned to support scalability, reliability and efficiency in maintenance across the regional markets.
QUALIFICATIONS / EXPERIENCE
- University degree in Business, Information Technology or equivalent
- Industry & functional knowledge of the web/app application platform solution
- Proven experience in successful rollouts and delivery of a digital platform – preferably at regional level
- 8+ years' working experience in Financial Services – Insurance / InsurTech-Fintech / Start-up environment experience, will be advantageous.
- Expertise in digital best practices and its applicability to lifestyle and financial services.
- Prior experience in managing cross-functional, multi-geography digital initiatives.
KNOWLEDGE & TECHNICAL SKILLS
Business Knowledge
Broad understanding of the insurance and technology industry, including current and emerging financial services, lifestyle, operations, and technology trends
Expert in partner engagement for ideation and problem-solving facilitation with stakeholders. Relevant application of design thinking methodologies that are aligned to achieving business performance metric needs.
Appreciate the business applications of emerging technologies and practices; applicable knowledgebase of DevOps, Cloud, Microservices and Mobile development to ensure feasibility and relevant conversations during solution planning.
Technical Skills
- Skilled in Agile Software delivery (Scrum or similar)
- Can create an environment that inspires others involved with the platform development to bring their creative ideas forward.
- Displays leadership with a platform vision that can inspire those involved with the platform project to bring the best application of efforts from themselves
- Good in facilitating people/customer centric design thinking and relevant application to digital platform requirements
- Ability to use excellent judgment and have high standards and are never satisfied with the status quo.
- Manage cross-functional stakeholders, and able to communicate effectively with country business function leads, and where expected with external key functional leaders for country-specific and group-led initiatives
- Strong understanding of technology concepts and developer languages
- Commercially Savvy to ensure identification and development of digital platform improvements to meet the business and users’ needs.
- Proven record of Product Backlog management (using JIRA or something similar)
- Build prototypes with UX/UI designers with data driven approach using analytics
Management Skills
- Demonstrate excellent leadership and communication skills across all levels of the organization, including frequent engagement at both country and group functional heads levels
- Able to deal with ambiguity and can contextualize and translate a problem and its solution to internal senior partners of varying backgrounds to support the platform ideas.
- Can create an environment that motivates others involved with the platform development to express their professional views forward.
- Displays leadership with a platform vision that can inspire those involved with the platform project to bring the best application of efforts from themselves
- Manage cross-functional stakeholders, and able to communicate effectively with country business function leads, and where expected with external key functional leaders for country-specific and group-led initiatives