Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Underwriting Program Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Underwriting Program Manager leads cross-functional delivery of underwriting initiatives from concept through production, ensuring consistent application of underwriting strategy, policy, and controls. This role partners with underwriting leaders, product, data science, IT, compliance, and third-party vendors to standardize underwriting guidelines, implement automation, measure program performance, and drive continuous improvement that improves risk selection, loss ratios, and time-to-issue.

Key responsibilities include program governance, change management, project delivery, vendor oversight, analytics-enabled decisioning, and operator enablement. The ideal candidate is a strategic program manager with deep underwriting domain expertise, strong data literacy, and proven ability to translate business priorities into scalable solutions.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Underwriter or Lead Underwriter with program or project responsibilities
Underwriting Operations Manager or Process Improvement Lead
Insurance Product Manager or Risk Analyst

Advancement To:

Director, Underwriting Programs / Underwriting Transformation
Head of Underwriting Operations or VP, Underwriting Strategy
Head of Enterprise Risk or Chief Underwriting Officer (CUO)

Lateral Moves:

Product Management (insurance products)
Enterprise Program Management Office (PMO)
Data & Analytics leadership roles focused on underwriting

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the end-to-end delivery of enterprise underwriting programs, including scoping, business case development, roadmap prioritization, resource planning, and staged rollout to achieve defined KPIs (e.g., improved hit rate, reduced loss ratio, faster turnaround time).
Define and own program governance structures: steering committees, RACI matrices, decision gates, communications cadence, executive reporting, and escalation paths to ensure alignment and timely decisions.
Translate underwriting strategy into executable initiatives by collaborating with underwriting leadership to codify policy, appetite, exceptions, and delegated authority into operational requirements.
Design and implement standardized underwriting guidelines and rule-sets across multiple lines of business, ensuring consistency, regulatory compliance, and measurable underwriting outcomes.
Partner with data science and analytics teams to develop scorecards, propensity models, and automated decisioning logic; define model acceptance criteria, monitoring metrics, and rollback plans.
Drive automation and straight-through processing initiatives (STP) by prioritizing use cases, working with IT/engineering to implement APIs, decision engines, and workflow orchestration, and tracking STP rate improvements.
Own program-level risk management: identify operational, model, regulatory, and vendor risks; develop mitigation plans; and report residual risk to senior leadership.
Manage cross-functional release planning and sprint delivery with engineering and product teams, ensuring underwriter requirements, UAT, and change controls are completed prior to production deployment.
Oversee vendor selection, contracting, and third-party integration for underwriting platforms, data providers, and specialty services; manage SLAs, vendor performance reviews, and remediation.
Establish and monitor program metrics and dashboards (e.g., time-to-bind, referral rate, accuracy of risk selection, claims frequency) and drive data-informed interventions to improve performance.
Lead large-scale change management: develop communication plans, training programs, playbooks, and on-the-job support to ensure adoption of new underwriting tools, policies, or automation.
Coordinate and execute policy exception frameworks, including delegated authority matrices, exception approval workflows, and periodic trend reviews to control adverse selection.
Conduct financial analysis and benefit tracking for underwriting initiatives: quantify expected P&L impact, track realized savings or revenue uplift, and reforecast business cases.
Facilitate cross-functional workshops, design sprints, and underwriting juries to test new frameworks, clarify edge cases, and refine decision rules prior to scale.
Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for underwriting strategy, program artifacts, SOPs, and audit trails to support internal audits and regulatory examinations.
Lead root-cause investigations for underwriting quality issues and implement corrective action plans, including remediation of backlog and retraining programs for underwriters and distribution partners.
Coordinate integrations with distribution channels and brokers to align underwriting requirements, data capture standards, and digital submission flows to maximize straight-through acceptance.
Develop pricing and risk segmentation inputs with actuarial and product teams to ensure underwriting rules reflect real-world loss expectations and pricing segmentation.
Drive continuous process improvement initiatives using Lean, Six Sigma, or Agile practices to eliminate waste, reduce cycle time, and increase underwriting throughput without compromising risk controls.
Oversee pilot programs and phased rollouts: define pilot success criteria, manage sample sizes, collect learning, and drive rapid iteration before enterprise-wide deployment.
Serve as the primary business owner during regulatory change or product launches by ensuring underwriting impacts are captured, documented, and implemented in a controlled way that preserves compliance.
Collaborate with Fraud, Claims, and Legal teams to ensure underwriting rules and data flows detect fraud patterns early and align with claims adjudication and contract terms.
Manage stakeholder relationships across distribution, IT, analytics, compliance, actuarial, and finance to drive consensus, prioritize trade-offs, and secure budget and resource commitments.
Coach and mentor junior program managers, business analysts, and underwriting champions to build a repeatable, sustainable program delivery capability within underwriting.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist with UAT test case authoring, defect triage, and verification of fixes for underwriting system changes.
Maintain an issues backlog and coordinate remediation tracking across stakeholders until closure.
Support procurement and contract renewals for underwriting tools and external data sources.
Help design training modules, quick-reference guides, and e-learning content to accelerate adoption of underwriting program changes.
Participate in vendor governance meetings and prepare executive-ready vendor performance summaries.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Underwriting program management and governance: experience creating steering committees, RACI, and program roadmaps for underwriting transformations.
Insurance underwriting domain expertise across personal lines and/or commercial lines, including risk appetite, policy language, coverage, exclusions, and endorsements.
Data-driven decisioning: ability to partner with analytics teams to translate model outputs into operational rules and measure performance (A/B testing experience a plus).
Automation & straight-through processing (STP): experience implementing decision engines, rule management systems, and API integrations to increase automation rates.
Regulatory & compliance knowledge: familiarity with insurance regulatory frameworks, audit readiness, and documentation practices.
Vendor management: experience with vendor selection, contract management, SLAs, and third-party integrations.
Project delivery methodologies: strong command of Agile, Scrum, and traditional waterfall approaches; experience aligning product and engineering teams.
Business analysis: capability to write clear requirements, acceptance criteria, user stories, and process flows for underwriting systems.
Financial acumen: P&L literacy to quantify program ROI, model profitability impacts, and report business case performance.
Quality assurance & testing: experience coordinating UAT, regression testing, and production validations for underwriting system releases.
Tools: familiarity with policy administration systems, rule engines (e.g., FICO, Pega, Drools), BI tools (Tableau, Power BI), SQL, and portfolio analytics platforms.
Change management tools and frameworks: experience applying ADKAR, Prosci, or comparable change management practices.
Risk modeling and segmentation basics: ability to interpret actuarial outputs and convert them to operational underwriting guidelines.
Documentation & audit trails: expertise creating SOPs, playbooks, and regulatory artifacts.

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder influence and executive communication with proven ability to distill complex underwriting topics into concise, actionable updates.
Leadership and team development: coach and mentor cross-functional teams and build underwriting champions.
Strategic thinking with tactical execution; balances long-term underwriting strategy with immediate delivery needs.
Problem solving and root-cause analysis: methodical, hypothesis-driven approach to resolving underwriting quality and performance issues.
High emotional intelligence and conflict resolution for negotiating trade-offs between risk, speed, and customer experience.
Prioritization and time management under competing demands and tight regulatory deadlines.
Customer and broker empathy: understands distribution needs and designs underwriting programs that enable growth while preserving underwriting discipline.
Adaptability and resilience in a fast-paced, change-heavy environment.
Attention to detail and strong documentation discipline to meet audit and compliance standards.
Collaboration mindset across actuarial, claims, product, IT, and distribution partners.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Risk Management, Insurance, Economics, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (MBA, MS in Risk Management, or related) or advanced professional credentials (CPCU, ARM, ASP, or PMP).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Risk Management and Insurance
Finance, Economics, or Business Administration
Data Analytics, Statistics, or Computer Science

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–12+ years of professional experience, combining underwriting domain experience with program or project management.

Preferred:

7+ years of underwriting experience in insurance (personal or commercial lines) and 3+ years leading enterprise programs or large cross-functional projects.
Demonstrated experience implementing underwriting automation, managing vendor integrations, and driving measurable improvements in underwriting KPIs.
Proven track record of working with data science, actuarial, product, and engineering teams to operationalize models and deploy decisioning logic.
Prior experience in heavily regulated markets and familiarity with compliance and audit processes.
Certifications such as PMP, Lean Six Sigma, CPCU, or equivalent are advantageous.