Alan | Product manager

👋 I'm Alan, a seasoned software engineer. After my degree in Computer Science, I co-founded a startup in the consumer space, where I led a team of developers, and built a strong mobile app focused business. From there, I worked at a product agency building, managing an engineering team, dealing with industry agnostic projects, incl. finance, travel, health, retail, and property management.

I have expertise in mobile development, and backend systems including Ruby on Rails. I also have a keen interest in data analysis and business intelligence.

What Do I Do at Kota?

I'm primarily the mobile product manager at Kota. My role is to ensure that our mobile products align with customer needs, while meeting the latest UI and UX standards. I often create and facilitate the product and system design for each product and feature, taking the problem back to basics, to simplify the experience for our customers.

I manage the mobile team, but help with other projects across the company. My key responsibilities range from ensuring our mobile designs meet product requirements, code reviews, quality assurance, and packaging each mobile release.

What’s the best thing about working for Kota?

I find it fulfilling to work on projects that simplify complex financial products, like health insurance and pensions, making them more accessible to everyone. At Kota, we are working hard to optimise our services to be helpful for each individual's particular situation, without the need to go through frustrating hoops.

I’m happy to be working with such a great team, including three of my old colleagues & co-founder from my earlier startup days + so many talented people and founders from other startups & industries.

What is the biggest problem you want to solve within Kota?

I’m personally pumped to remove this industries ancient shackles.

A big challenge we're taking on is simplifying the health and pension enrolment process for people in every stage of life, while also educating them. From Kota customers to friends & family, I've gathered many different personas and their varying understanding of what they can or should be doing regarding their financial benefits. Simplifying the checkout process for a wide range of people, and educating them, will make a huge difference in their financial lives.

Another challenge we face is optimising our service to be helpful for each individual's particular situation. It's a really interesting but challenging problem to solve. At the moment, to get from 0 to pension, you'll likely need to fully rely on an advisor (if you’re lucky to have the time or access to one) before you can even get started.

At Kota, we’re taking on this challenge and working towards a simple solution that meets the unique needs of each of our customers.