Meet Kieran Topp, INSTANDA's New Head of Product

We’re delighted to introduce our new Head of Product at INSTANDA. With over a decade of experience in the insurance industry, Kieran brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our team.

Having spent the last few years leading a highly successful global underwriting and product development function, we explore how Kieran’s background and approach will help us continue to deliver exceptional value to our clients.

Join us as we get to know Kieran and officially welcome him to the team!

Could you tell us about your career before INSTANDA?

I've been working in insurance for over 10 years now. I came out of university and took a couple of different roles before landing a junior account support role for a niche Managing General Agent (MGA). At the time, the MGA, was working with around 20 clients, nearly all of which were based in the UK, on one product line.

It was a rapidly growing business and so I naturally progressed into different roles. I quickly moved into managing key client accounts and supporting business development throughout Europe (primarily in Germany and Austria) before stepping in to establish the underwriting function in 2019. At the same time, we had just been through an MBO so this was a fast-paced role with ambitious targets that broadened my horizons quite considerably.

As the business continued to expand into new territories, my role grew to encompass Underwriting, Product and Partnerships. By the time I left, the business had exited from private equity backing and into the ownership of a major specialty insurance provider in the US and I was the global Head of Product and Underwriting. Holding this position gave me a deep understanding of product development, pricing, risk analysis, securing capacity (having grown the company’s panel from a single UK carrier to 11 covering the UK, Europe and North America), and MGA governance.

How does your background benefit you in your current role?

My experience has given me a strong understanding of what makes MGAs and insurers “tick”, as I was the lead global underwriter for the best part of five years. I have a keen understanding of the genesis of setting up an MGA, getting products to market, securing capacity and moving through the gears from Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to scaling at pace.

One of my strengths is proof of concept. I see an opportunity, from both a client and business perspective, and work with other members of the team to translate that into something that delivers genuine value.

What brought you to INSTANDA?

That's a good question. I was taking a train home from an underwriting conference in London and a message from INSTANDA’s Recruitment Manager, Yagini Dave, popped into my inbox. It didn’t have the feeling of your usual, cold LinkedIn “we’ve got an opportunity” email. There was something different about INSTANDA’s vision and presentation that had suddenly struck a chord.

What really attracted me to INSTANDA is the philosophy that its innovative, no-code solution truly is a global force for good. By democratising the technology behind insurance products, enhancing efficiencies for providers and promoting easier, quicker access to digital insurance products for customers, INSTANDA positively impacts people’s lives. At INSTANDA, and speaking with my underwriter hat on, we also free up insurance professionals’ valuable time and brainpower. This allows them to focus on more challenging and rewarding tasks, support innovation, and ultimately deliver real value.

Plus, and this really was a big draw for me, I get to work with some phenomenally clever people. INSTANDA really is an incredible, fast-paced, innovative environment to work in.

What does your role involve?

I know it sounds like the old cliché, but as Head of Product, no two days are the same. The only certainties are that the sun will come up and the sun will go down, and a whole host of innovative and exciting things can happen in between those two events.

My team and I work across the whole of INSTANDA. I am passionate believer that great things are a result of a collective input, challenge and effort. One day, I might be developing and reviewing our strategic product roadmap, exploring new product ideas or partnerships, fostering collaboration between teams, or supporting my team in Agile ceremonies. Another day, I could be working on documentation or platform Go-To-Market messaging with Marketing or Sales. My role is about maintaining constant curiosity and an open mindset to make tomorrow even better based on what we learn today.

What do you hope to achieve in your role?

Traditionally, product roles can end up pigeonholed purely between the outward “what” and the inside “how” but I’m a firm believer that a key factor in a product’s success is in taking a broader view of the field. As such, my intention is to continue developing the Product Strategy team into a truly enabling function, through active partnering with the wider business and directly interacting with our valued clients and those using the system to understand their thoughts and needs. Working together in “listening mode” is key to finding and answering the important questions and achieving success. In this way, the Product Strategy team will directly support INSTANDA’s ambitious growth plans by ensuring our direction of travel aligns with client and market needs, and prioritising features and enhancements that add real value.

How does INSTANDA prioritise features and enhancements within its product roadmap?

Fundamentally, every choice we make must come back to a question and the value of the given solution: Why does it matter? What difference does it make to our customers? What are the physical or even emotional experiences that we are trying to solve for them – be they underwriters, claims handlers, system configurators, brokers or policyholders?

We constantly ask ourselves these questions when looking at the road ahead. Then we review the feasibility of a given enhancement or solution. We run it through our Architecture and Product Design teams to understand the art of the possible as well as how we can build it into INSTANDA’s intuitive UX. A critical step is the “second track” back out to other key areas of the business, as I mentioned earlier, to obtain a broad and balanced view, as well as working with external partners or conducting research to “join the dots” and identify the key strategic items across different customers, user types or geographies.

Our roadmap is already strong but over the coming months we'll be working together with our marketing team to make it more ‘interactive’ to share and discuss with our customers, prospects and partners. After all, and coming back to the topic of collaboration, the road forward should be a two-way street so that we have an even sharper lens on delivering exceptional value.

With such a busy role, how do you balance work and life?

Music is my main passion, and always has been. Outside of INSTANDA, I play guitar in a couple of different bands, and I’ve toured, headlined and played at numerous festivals – one year we were even shortlisted for an industry award. I still enjoy writing and performing, mainly as it’s just such a great release. When I’m playing music, it’s like I’m in the middle of a chalk circle where everything else in time and space just pauses for a while.

I also have a 2-year-old golden retriever, Echo, who keeps me quite busy. Taking him for a walk is another great way of closing things down in my mind. I am a big believer that a good work ethic is rooted in an equally balanced rest ethic.

I am also fluent in German and spent a year teaching English in the far-western mountains of Austria. So again, a bit like my music, there’s always something new to learn. I guess this loops back neatly to INSTANDA and its infinite configurability, there’s something about endless possibility which really calls out to me – on a professional and personal level.