Roy Feig | Honeycomb Insurance | How Do You Build an Efficient Insurance Product?
Description
Honeycomb is both an insurtech and the insurance carrier itself: it insures investors' rental buildings in the US (commercial lines) and sells mainly through insurance agents. Roy Feig, the company's VP Product, explains to Eyal David why this market has a real failure (giant carriers exit entire states like California after wildfires), and how Honeycomb turned underwriting from a manual half-hour-per-request process into a system where about 60% of decisions are automatic. He describes how he split the product team by persona and metric (agents and retention, underwriters and efficiency, partnerships and the insured), how they measure feature impact on the business, how they release models gradually and sample them, and how hard it is to build a product, remotely, for an industry you don't come from. He closes with his career, from medical devices at AngioSlide through Kenshoo (now Skai), and advice for anyone moving into a new industry: listen, be curious, and ask why.
Key moments
- 01:03 · What Honeycomb is: an insurtech that is also the carrier
- 05:04 · The founders and the market failure: why California lacks insurance
- 07:51 · A relationships business: what traditional underwriting looks like
- 08:55 · Efficiency, loss ratio and a product team organized by persona
- 12:27 · Agent retention and low-touch onboarding
- 17:51 · The competition and who the insurance agent is
- 21:24 · Morning metrics and measuring feature impact
- 23:50 · From zero automation to 60% with models and AI
- 26:34 · Sampling models and measuring accuracy
- 32:21 · The most important product manager skills
- 36:41 · The challenges: distance from the market, onboarding and growth
- 41:58 · Career: from medical devices to Kenshoo to insurance
- 48:56 · How to break into a new industry