Beyond Shipping Insurance: Building Better Products by Delivering Seamless Experiences

Chapter 3: The profound impact of empowering teams.

Welcome to the last blog in our series on building products and our methodologies at Anansi. In this blog, we will explore a topic very close to my heart: empowerment. 

This is definitely the pillar that I feel the most passionate about because I fundamentally believe it’s the most important and underappreciated part of product and successful product teams. At Anansi, we're not just building a product but solving difficult problems in last-mile shipping for retailers.

I believe the only way to deliver impactful, customer-centric solutions is by truly empowering our teams—not just by giving them the autonomy and tools to make decisions but by creating a culture of ‘missionaries and not mercenaries’ in a way whereby we embrace failure and bravely face up to problems.

Why empowering teams matters

In many organisations, product and engineering teams can feel stifled by rigid structures and top-down decision-making. At Anansi, we wanted to avoid this pitfall. 

Empowering our teams isn’t just about delegation; it’s about creating an environment where everyone—engineers, product managers, designers—feels they have a voice, can challenge priorities, explore new approaches and know they make a difference. This space for innovation and critical thinking fuels our ability to develop the right solutions for our customers. The team closest to the problem often has the best insights on how to solve it, and we encourage our teams to speak up when they feel we’re not hitting the mark. A challenge raised early can lead to a pivot that benefits everyone.

Autonomy, trust and the right culture also mean faster development. We operate in a fast-moving environment, so speed to production is vital. Product discovery and experimentation are what allow us to ensure we’re making the right decisions and solving the right problems. We can’t effectively do that if we’re hindered by blockers, approvals and red tape. 

However, true empowerment doesn’t come from autonomy alone. It requires trust and transparency. Autonomy and trust aren't just given; they need to be earned.  That’s why we focus on creating a culture where everyone is aligned on and driven towards a common goal—making shipping insurance as seamless and efficient as possible—and has the freedom to experiment and innovate within that framework.

Transparency in a remote-first empowered team

To create a truly empowered culture, there has to be trust and transparency, and operating as a fully remote team across Europe, communication is vital to that transparency. While we hold daily stand-ups and follow the usual Scrum practices, we don't rely solely on formal meetings to keep things moving. We've created a virtual office environment where communication flows freely—almost as if we’re in the same room. This allows us to stay aligned, respond quickly to changes, and always keep the dialogue open.

Although It doesn’t always work as we hoped it would. In a remote-first environment, things can be missed, updates can be misinterpreted and communication can fall down. Unfortunately, when this happens, it can have a damaging effect on the trust and, therefore, empowerment of the product team, but we embrace failure. We are always looking for ways we can improve to ensure we always maintain a strong culture of trust and transparency, which ultimately leads to faster development, better product experimentation and customer-centric solutions. 

What our approach has unlocked

By focusing on empowered teams, customer-centricity, and data, we’ve not only solved some of the most significant pain points for retailers but also unlocked a new level of trust and efficiency in how shipping insurance is handled.

This approach has also allowed us to stay flexible and experiment. We don’t build features for the sake of it; we test ideas, learn from the results, and pivot if necessary. This constant cycle of iteration and improvement means that we’re consistently delivering value that matters most to our customers.

Conclusion: Innovation That Works for Customers and the Business

At Anansi, everything we do comes back to the customer. By empowering our teams, prioritising customer needs, and using data to drive our decisions, we’ve created products that solve real problems and provide a seamless, almost invisible experience.

We’re not just building shipping insurance—we’re building trust and efficiency and delivering accountability into every delivery journey. As we continue to evolve, our focus will remain the same: making our customers’ lives easier, one shipment at a time.

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