Designing for complexity: Meet the Design team at Artificial

Design with a seat at the table

For Jon, good design depends on designers being involved early, while the decisions that shape the platform are still being made. "One of the big things I'm really pushing for is making sure that design as a function is recognised here, and is in the room when we make big decisions," he says.

That belief shapes how our teams are built. Every cross-functional team at Artificial has a designer working alongside product and engineering, and each one also includes someone whose job is to represent the customer.

For a broker or underwriter working with us, this means the people deciding what the platform should do sit next to the people building it, with someone in the conversation speaking up for you. A decision made at the planning stage carries through to the screens your team ends up using. Jon works across both levels himself, moving between the strategic conversations and getting as close to the product as he can.

One platform that feels unified

Artificial's platform supports brokers and underwriters across a wide range of products and ways of working. Keeping all of that coherent is one of the team's biggest jobs, and Jon sees the platform's breadth as both a strength and a challenge for designers. "What we're really pushing for is to try and make it feel super unified," he says.

James describes the scale of what they're designing for. "It's a whole operating system for insurance technology," he says. "We're building a system for systems."

That breadth gives our partners room to shape the platform around how they work. Two partners might use it in very different ways, and the team designs for that, tailoring the experience to each one while keeping the foundations consistent. When a partner adds a new product or brings another team on board, the platform already feels familiar to them.

Building with our partners, one release at a time

The team has a big ambition for the platform, and they're practical about how to reach it. Work is planned around what to ship next, guided by what the next partner needs. "We can't build it all at once," James explains. "So it's quite often a case of understanding what our next partner needs, and making sure we release something that's useful and builds towards the grander vision."

For partners, that means steady progress that makes sense for their business, with each release adding something they can put to work straight away.

Partners also help shape what gets built. Sajjad spends much of his time prototyping, and customers are brought into that process so their voice is heard. The team pairs those conversations with plenty of hands-on work. "We get into the nitty-gritty of the problem," he says, "and try to see what experience we think our customers will enjoy using."

The team has also become much quicker at turning ideas into working software. They use AI to move from an early idea to a clear spec, and from there to production-ready code. James is proud of what that has made possible. "It's one of the strongest design engineering teams that I've been part of."

A team that enjoys the hard problems

Artificial is growing fast, and the Design team is growing with it. Because the platform is so broad, there's always more to design, and Jon says the team is almost always hiring. "The great thing about being here is there are just almost abundant opportunities," he says.

The people who do well here enjoy getting to grips with technical subjects. Insurance has its own language and a lot of moving parts, and the work asks designers to understand them properly before trying to simplify anything. "You fit best here if you're comfortable with complexity and more technical products," says Jon.

Sajjad sees that complexity as the best part of the job. Working through difficult problems and finding a way to solve them is what he enjoys most, and the team has fun along the way. "Being comfortable in that zone is what makes working here at Artificial very enjoyable," he says.

If you'd like to join our Design team, take a look at our open roles. If you want to find out more about how we work with our partners, get in touch.