Experience report from working @Tryg

As many of my fellows and followers know, I started at Tryg at the start of 2020. Since that time, a couple of people asked me if this is the right place to work, why did I choose it and why am I staying there?

 In this briefing, I am trying to reflect on the last eight months of my career and how is working at Tryg is impacting it. I will try to be short and categorize my thoughts in a couple of main points:

 Professional and personal growth:

Plant an acorn into the wrong soil and it will die while planting in the right soil and nurturing it will result in huge beautiful Oak tree.

 People who knows me well also know that I do never work at a place because of the money. Of course, I must get a fair compensation, but this is far away from the source of my intrinsic motivation. What has always been interesting for me is to surround myself with people who can:

• form a team that pulls in the same direction
• contribute to each other’s growth
• develop me and my skills
• open to learn from my experiences
• honest, transparent and direct

Since I started at Tryg I have witnessed a culture of curiosity, I seldom have seen other places. We know that curiosity is the driving force behind lifelong learning. Tryg has been there before me and many others. Digital disruptiveness has also reached the insurance industry. Tryg is undergoing one of its major transformations these days and we can almost feel that there is a journey for everything: Digitization, Agile transformation, Technical excellence, DevSecOps and Continuous Improvements to mention some.

 I personally have held courses and certifications for about 150 colleagues in modern ways of working in both technical subjects like Architecture, Continuous Delivery and XP and in more softer subjects like Leading a Change, Product Management and Team Collaboration. What amazes me specially is the willingness to try new ways of doing things despite the successes Tryg has always had using the methods and ways of working they already know. Many things are not put in stone. I still did not meet anyone who knows all the answers or closes his ears and do not want to listen and discuss.

 I feel that our common consciousness believes that the knowledge that have brought us to where we are today is not enough to bring us to the desired future state. Therefore, the openness toward new knowledge and knowledge sharing. I often hear in the corridors: "sharing is caring".

  Technologies and innovation

 One of my contacts asked me one day: Is not it very old technologies Tryg has in their technical stack? My answer was: yes, but NOT ONLY. The truth is: if you are looking to work with only cutting edge and new technology then you need to work all your life at a Startup and change your workplace every year or so. Technologies are being improved each day and newer technologies are coming all the time. After being able to create a stable business, you will have some older technologies in your stack. Tryg has today a lot of technological solutions that are both old and need to be sun set, but it also has a lot of cutting-edge technologies that are in use and some that are still under evaluation. This must be like in heaven for techies like me who want to touch both worlds and be part of introduction of innovations that helps both people and environment.

 We have established a technical Radar with different investment and investigation horizons. In the Tech Radar  we categorize technologies as either worth to be sun set where no further investments are needed, are in use and provide us with the main income, Coming soon and worth investing heavily in and at the end come technologies we would like to evaluate to see if there is something in them in some years.

 This is one of the ways we keep innovating new technical solutions to help cope with real business challenges. Here are some of the technologies you find in our Radar : Holograms, Process mining, RPA, Machine learning, Digital twins, Conversational interfaces, VR, AR, Autonomous cars and many more. Of course we are an insurance company, but as you know, these days every business is a software business and those who can not cope with developing quality software at scale will not be able to exist in the next era.

 I feel that I am lucky to be able to work with both worlds of technologies and be able to touch both rock-solid components and very young alpha released technological innovations. Not to forget that we at Tryg work together with some of the world’s best suppliers within software development and operations. Interacting with these people brings a lot of value and adds a possibility of scaling that is difficult to find if we were limited to our own staff.

 Where are we heading?

some people have already seen that we are trying to transform a super tanker into a speed boat. My comment to that is: No, we are not trying to do that: We believe in what Yoda said Do or do not! There is no try. We are well on our way with our Lean Agile transformation, digitization of many manual process and modernization of the technical stack. I believe the mixture of all these ingredients makes Tryg the best place for professional and personal growth and for sharpening the skills I and you already have.

 This was some of my reflections on my journey together with Tryg since January 2020. I am looking forward to the next part of the journey. Are you curious? Maybe you are sitting there and thinking about if there is a possibility to join this troop? Well, there is always a chance, you need just to act!