Intact Insurance
Built Intact Insurance’s mobile engineering practice from scratch in six months and shipped an MVP app.
Achievements
- Built a software engineering tribe and launched an app within 6 months
- Scaled from one development crew to two, growing the team’s own Rogue 1 / Rogue 2 identity
- Established team rituals, quarterly offsites, and the Mobi Awards, to sustain culture through fast growth
An Inspiring Mission
“Building the best insurance app in the world” is not a mission that motivates anyone. I looked for the shared values already in the room, wrapped in a metaphor the team would recognize as their own, and found it in Star Wars.
BB-8 became our reference: loyal, proactive, and packed with clever tech. It gave the team a shared language for what good work looked like, long before we ever wrote it down as values.
“You’re nothing without your team.”
Anna Wintour
Leading Through Culture
A Strong Team Identity
We leaned into the Star Wars metaphor and became Rogue 1: brave as the pilots, masterly as the Jedi, caring as the Resistance. When we scaled to a second development team, the identity scaled with it, Rogue 2.
Uniting Rituals
Coffee every Wednesday morning. A team vote for Most Valuable Player at the end of each sprint. A bell rung when a story closes, and a rotating hand on the launch button. None of it was process, it was culture, and it held through two years of fast growth.
A Sustainable, Inclusive Process
The team spanned strategy, design and engineering at once. We used Agile as the base and extended it into three tracks, Discovery, Design, Development, each with its own owner for the outcome.
Good products don’t happen in one step. This gave every discipline a clear stake in the journey from problem to launch, instead of a handoff at the end.
Inclusive Planning
Twice a year, the whole team built the roadmap together: the strategic direction, the quick wins, the user problems we wanted to solve, and what we wanted to learn along the way.
Once we had all four, we prioritized for value and impact as a group, not a hierarchy.
Empowering Responsibilities
Every role matters, but perception doesn’t always agree. One of our quality analysts put it plainly:
“I am the only person in the team that does not build anything.”
J., Quality AnalystJ. had some of the best product ideas on the team and understood the app better than almost anyone. We renamed the role, from Quality Analyst to Guardian of Quality, and gave it real weight: ownership of the defects backlog and the final go or no-go on every release.
Leading Shoulder to Shoulder
Two years, two teams, 24 releases without missing a sprint, and not a single person who wanted to leave. That’s not culture as a nice-to-have. That’s culture as the delivery mechanism.
