Dais Platform

I co-founded Dais and led product design for 7 years — from zero to acquisition. What started as a submission management tool evolved into something more valuable: an engine that let insurance carriers ditch paper forms and go digital in weeks instead of years. That system became the primary reason Origami Risk acquired us in 2023.

Overview

Role: Co-Founder, Head of Product Design

Timeline: 2017–2023

Team: Product, Engineering, Sales, Insurance Subject Matter Experts

Outcome: Acquired by Origami Risk in 2023

The Problem

Insurance carriers were stuck. Digitizing a single insurance product — taking it from paper forms and PDFs to a modern digital experience — typically required a bespoke technical build that took 12+ months and significant budget. Most carriers had dozens of product lines. The math didn't work.

The forms themselves were the hard part. Insurance applications aren't linear — they're deeply conditional. Answer "yes" to one question and you unlock 20 more. Enter a revenue figure in a certain range and the entire question set changes. Paper handled this with instructions and asterisks. Digital required real logic infrastructure.

On top of that, data was still moving through email and PDF attachments. Carriers and agents were receiving forms, printing them, entering the data manually, and filing them for compliance. It was slow, error-prone, and completely unscalable.

The Solution

We built a carrier product digitization platform with three interconnected layers:

1. The Product Builder
Carriers could configure their insurance products inside Dais — defining questions, conditional logic, and dependency rules — and deploy them as live digital products. No bespoke dev work required. Average time to deploy: 24 days. Fastest ever: 3 days. Industry standard before Dais: 12+ months.

2. Dual-Mode Data Entry
Every digitized product had two interfaces built from the same data model. A clean, guided front end for policyholders — walkable, emailable, designed for people who fill out one insurance form a year. And a more robust back end for agents and carriers — with full change logs, field-level history, and compliance-ready audit trails. For complex B2B insurance, where information gathering is an extended back-and-forth, agents could send the form directly to the policyholder to capture initial data, then pick up from there.

3. PDF Data Extraction
Carriers and agents weren't going to stop receiving PDFs overnight. We built a tool that parsed incoming PDF forms and extracted the data into the system, eliminating manual re-entry. This was before AI made this trivial — we built it from scratch.

My Role

Led all product design and UX research from day one
Spent weeks embedded with underwriters and agents to understand workflows before designing anything
Designed the conditional form logic system — the technical core of the product
Built the design system and maintained WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility across the platform
Grew the design org from just me to 5+ designers, researchers, and copywriters
Collaborated closely with engineering on the hard infrastructure problems

Key Design Decisions

Conditional logic as a design problem, not just a technical one

The form dependency system was genuinely complex — numerical ranges triggering different question sets, yes/no answers unlocking entirely new branches. The challenge wasn't just building the logic, it was making it manageable for the carrier configuring it and invisible to the policyholder filling it out. We designed a configuration layer that let non-technical carrier staff set up and manage their own products.

Two interfaces, one data model

The policyholder experience and the agent/carrier experience needed to feel completely different while staying perfectly in sync. Policyholders needed simplicity and guidance. Agents needed control, history, and compliance coverage. Building both on the same underlying data model was the right call — it meant no duplication, no drift, and clean audit trails by default.

Meet users where they are

We learned early that carriers weren't going to abandon PDFs and email overnight. Instead of fighting that, we made it easy to work within existing habits while gradually demonstrating the value of the platform. PDF extraction was a bridge, not a concession.

Outcomes

Acquired by Origami Risk in 2023 — form digitization was the primary driver
24-day average time to deploy a carrier product vs. 12+ month industry standard
Fastest deployment ever: 3 days
Hundreds of product lines shipped across 20+ insurance carriers
Adopted by multiple carriers as a compliance management tool
Policyholder portal deployed across multiple carriers post-launch

What I Learned

The real problem is rarely the obvious one.

We started by trying to fix how submissions were communicated. The deeper problem was the forms themselves. Following that thread led to the product that actually mattered.

Unglamorous infrastructure is often the differentiator.

The conditional logic system wasn't the flashiest design work. But it was what competitors couldn't replicate and what made us acquisition-worthy.

Complexity is the designer's problem.

Insurance forms are genuinely hard. Our job was to make that hardness invisible — to the policyholder filling out a form, to the carrier configuring a product, and to the agent managing a submission.