Zhenni Zhang, senior product compliance director for NEXT Insurance, has embraced leadership opportunities throughout her life.
A linguistics major in college, Zhenni worked as an orientation counselor on campus. After graduation, she started her career in the legal profession as a paralegal, later moving on to Uber's compliance organization. From there, she moved on to NEXT. While the company was relatively mature compared to other insurtechs, compared to more established tech startups like Uber, there were still plenty of opportunities to take charge.
Working at Uber "was my first insight into a later-stage startup," Zhang says. "One of the things I experienced there was systems and processes that were cool to be exposed to, like playbooks that I still use today with my team."
"What attracted me to NEXT was the opportunity to create new systems and structures from scratch," she adds. "A lot of times people don't see the back end of how insurance gets approved or how products get built and launched, or how much of an advantage you have by being agile and speedy with filings. It's really cool that our team is really working side by side with insurance product managers driving this impact."
Zhang says that her understanding of insurance before coming to NEXT came from the door-to-door salespeople she encountered living in Singapore for some time in her youth. At NEXT, she takes pride in being able to bring the insurance industry into a new era, embracing automation where it's possible so that the company can file compliant products quickly in every state, consolidating implementation workflows and building a Slack bot to streamline communication between employees.
"A lot of insurance filings can be manual," she explains. "So what we're doing internally is constantly trying to examine them and make those processes more scalable. We work on lots of little and big automation initiatives."
As she grew as a manager and hired more associates, Zhang also grew to understand the importance of insurance's mission. In NEXT's case, that's supporting small and midsize business owners with the insurance coverage they need to succeed in their dream.
"As I spent time at NEXT, another thing that really grew on me was interviewing people that were very attracted by the fact that we were servicing small medium business owners. Some of the people that I've hired had stories of their parents running small businesses or they themselves being small business owners. It was cool to see that evolution and be able to feel that we were supporting them directly."
Bringing in those enthusiastic employees shows how important culture is to Zhang. She says that NEXT's startup feel has maintained even as it's grown, and recalls a time early in her career when an offhand comment about wanting a new coffee machine ended up with her making a full pitch deck for the machine to the CFO of the company. Getting a small break to work on a fun, passion project resonated with her.
"It's little things that we built in the beginning that became a lasting legacy. One joke at NEXT is that I helped build the 'coffee program,' I had to make a presentation to the CFO. It's little things like that that set the culture," she says. "The biggest takeaway that happened to me with this experience wasn't the fact that we got a coffee machine. It was that at NEXT, if there is something you want to do, you need to go do it and you'll be given the opportunity."
