PartnerRe
PartnerRe - UWIN
An internal product for PartnerRe's reinsurance teams, consolidating legacy systems into one place for task management, in-app messaging and applicant approvals.
- Many Systems → 1 Legacy platforms consolidated
- Reinsurance Built for PartnerRe's reinsurance teams
- Lead UI Developer Role expanded mid-contract
- Usability Tested Qualitative sessions with employees
The Brief
Context
I joined PartnerRe on a six-month contract to lead the design of UWIN, a single internal product to replace the legacy systems its reinsurance teams worked across every day.
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Responsibilities
- Consolidate legacy systems into one unified product.
- Cover task management, in-app messaging and applicant approvals.
- Improve the daily work of reinsurance employees.
The existing systems were inefficient, buggy and hard to use, and some relied on third-party services. The bar for improvement was low, but the scope was broad: UWIN had to absorb a lot of functionality without becoming another complicated tool. The contract grew twice. First my role expanded to Lead UI Developer, and later I was asked to design HARP, a second product for a different team.
Discovery
Understanding reinsurance workflows
Discovery was a close partnership with UWIN's product owners. We planned IA models and workflow diagrams together, and I liaised regularly with the reinsurance team to share data and test our assumptions.
- Planned IA models and workflow diagrams with the product owners.
- Tested early assumptions directly with reinsurance users.
- Documented findings as a foundation for planning and strategy.
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The product owners were long-standing PartnerRe employees with a deep understanding of the internal systems and their problems. Drawing on that knowledge let me move quickly from their vision to a concrete model of the product. Working with the tech leads at the same time meant I understood the technical limits early, so the models we refined were ones the team could realistically build.
Craft
Wireframes, prototypes & testing
Once the mental model settled, I explored the proposed workflows in low-fidelity wireframes, refined them in workshops with the delivery team, then built interactive prototypes to test with employees.
- Iterated wireframes through regular design review workshops.
- Grew the wireframe components into a scalable design system.
- Ran qualitative A/B usability tests across different personas.
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The components used most in the wireframes set the priority for the design system: style guides, branding, navigation, page templates and interactive states. Pages and flows built from those assets became the prototypes used in testing. Each session compared alternative solutions to the same problem. The insights shaped UWIN's direction, and I helped educate the wider team on the design life cycle and UX and UI best practice along the way.
Build
Stepping in as Lead UI Developer
With no dedicated UI developer on the team, I offered to take the role myself, coding the front end so the full-stack developers could focus on functionality.
- Wrote CSS, SCSS and HTML layout templates.
- Worked with Angular, Material and Bootstrap.
- Kept code and designs in sync to hit release dates.
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Owning both the designs and the front-end code removed a lot of handoff friction. It also meant standardising how design moved into development, so I worked with the developers and scrum master to set up a repeatable process in DevOps for user stories, reviews, change requests and component updates, refining it with every sprint.
Impact
Outcome
UWIN launched to PartnerRe's reinsurance teams with unanimously positive feedback, and the work led directly to a second product for another part of the business.
- Legacy platforms eliminated, reducing cost and third-party reliance.
- Daily tasks completed faster through simpler, unified workflows.
- A design system in Figma and code for developers to build on.