Are life insurers chasing digital transformation or iterating with purpose?
Remember the good old days, when every aspect of a project was mapped out in detail well in advance? If all went well, a point would come when you could turn and point to a new product, and say, “There, all done… Now, let's celebrate!”
We may be experiencing a turning pointin which the all-encompassing Big Bang modernization project, with a distant but well-defined finish line, has been rendered redundant. But what is replacing that traditional approach?
In a Life Accelerated podcast episode, Insurance Innovation Reporter's Anthony O'Donnell sat down with Brian Poppe, now President at Mutual of Omaha, and Kim Pfiffner, CIO of US Insurance Solutions at Principal, to discuss how insurer IT has changed. What he uncovered were new ideas about development, about organization and about how we've recalibrated our expectations of how fast a goal can be accomplished.
Why the Big Bang model no longer works for life insurers #
Everything has changed in the last few years. Customer expectations are continually shifting, and technology has evolved alongside the processes we've created to speed up development.
Customer expectations are moving faster than multi-year roadmaps #
A multi-year Big Bang project locks in requirements at kickoff and delivers years later, against a market that's already moved on. Digital-first competitors set the pace now, and policyholders compare their insurer's digital experience to whatever app they used that morning, not to what “good enough” looked like when the project was scoped. Carriers rethinking this foundation are turning to resources like Equisoft's PAS Modernization Knowledge Hub for a structured view of what modernization looks like when it's built around continuous change instead of a single cutover.
The velocity of the life insurance industry is accelerating. And, as a result, projects and teams are being fragmented, then reformed in ways never seen before.
From monolithic launches to iterative sprints #
The all-encompassing Big Bang project has been made redundant. What replaced it, according to Kim Pfiffner, is the iterative generation of smaller products created in sprints that reduce risk and go live faster. And, more than ever, customers, distribution partners, and internal users are now becoming essential parts of those dynamic initiatives.
“Be willing to say to a distribution partner, ‘Would you be part of our pilot as we're rolling this out?’ Get their feedback early and often, versus waiting and hoping that you've managed the risk appropriately. I think it reduces risk to the organization tremendously and creates a much better customer experience.”
‒Kim Pfiffner, CIO of US Insurance Solutions at Principal
Given the rate at which customer needs are evolving, involving representatives of all stakeholders in your development process is critical to project success. If you don't have teams positioned to listen for feedback, then you're going to lose touch and become less relevant.
What iterative development changes for life insurers: #
- Ship smaller, product-line releases instead of one multi-year rollout.
- Loop distribution partners into pilots before full launch, not after it.
- Treat customer feedback as input to the next sprint, not a post-launch review.
- Reduce risk exposure by testing assumptions at a smaller scale first.
There's always the next best thing: Why digital transformation never really finishes #
In recent years, development projects have changed from traditional monolithic implementations to smaller initiatives focused on creating minimum viable products (MVP) with more targeted, smaller goals.
MVPs are milestones, not endpoints #
And each of these projects is a milestone in a larger effort to achieve bigger long-term business objectives, like enhancing CX or making the shift to a data-driven organization. The strategies and requirements that drive progress towards these larger goals will shift over time as customer needs evolve. And so, they are never really finished. The iterative projects keep on coming.
The same pattern is showing up across the industry #
This isn't unique to one carrier or one podcast conversation; it's the direction the whole industry is moving. Agentic AI in claims management, accelerated underwriting, and unstructured data initiatives are all being delivered the same way: as ongoing capability build-outs rather than one-time projects with a launch date. See how it's playing out more broadly in 5 Trends Reshaping Life Insurance in 2026.
How do you scope a project when you don't have all the requirements? #
In response to the changing development landscape, many companies have embarked on a journey to change the mindset of both the IT and business staff involved in these new kinds of projects.
What IT teams need to know upfront #
For the IT side, it means recognizing that they don't need all the requirements defined up front. They need to know enough about the problem they're trying to solve and what the strategy is for doing that, but not every single detail. That kind of understanding enables a process in which you can break a problem down into granular targets that can be delivered much more quickly than traditionally expected.
What business teams need to get comfortable with #
On the business side, they need to get comfortable with the reality that Phase 1 will be delivered, and it's their chance to provide feedback and ask for improvements that will appear in the next phase. The key to the success of the overall process is to then incorporate learnings from the first effort, make those adjustments to the plan, and deliver on the new direction quickly.
“There's always going to be another thing. There's a team that's dedicated to making underwriting better, or claims better, or making the application process for customers better. So, you don't need to dump all of the requirements on those teams on day one. Give them the minimum required necessary, watch them build, and then it's like, oh, the team is going to be interested in saying, ‘Well, we learned that customers freeze up on this particular question for whatever reason. So, let's find a way to either ask that question differently or break it apart into two questions or solve that problem.’”
‒Brian Poppe, President, Mutual of Omaha
What this means for life insurance leaders today #
Whether you're driving the technology roadmap or the operational one, the shift away from Big Bang thinking changes what you should be looking for in your own organization right now.
For IT leaders #
- Scope the next release around a problem statement, not a finished specification.
- Build parallel feedback channels so pilot data reaches the team before full rollout.
- Plan architecture for repeated, incremental releases instead of one large deployment.
For business leaders #
- Set expectations with the board around phased delivery, not a single go-live date.
- Identify one process, such as underwriting or claims, to pilot iteratively before scaling company-wide.
- Reframe success metrics around milestone velocity instead of a single project finish line.
Wrap up #
Digital transformation is a process, not an event. It's not the project to implement a new self-service portal. It's the larger ongoing initiative to transform into a data-driven, automated and scalable life insurer. And when a company plans how they will address those larger digitalization goals, it leads to a new way of thinking about how teams are organized, how they work together and what they build. The development environment itself becomes an ecosystem in which resources come together and connect to achieve small goals that roll up into a transformation that will power sustained customer experience (CX) improvement and business growth for the next generation. Carriers evaluating where to start can review how Equisoft/manage supports this kind of ongoing, iterative modernization rather than a single big-bang cutover.
