Here at Kin, we're always hard at work making sure our customer experience from policy purchase to filing a claim is seamless — and our Claims Product and Engineering team is no exception. We build solutions to help our customers have the best possible claims experience. But sometimes we like to take a break, come together, and work on fresh, experimental concepts that give our team the opportunity to learn new skills and have some fun.
With that in mind, we recently held our inaugural Kin Claims Hackathon.
Our Claims Engineering team traveled to Chicago from all over the country with one thing in mind — to build a solution that helps our claims adjusters write better communications, faster. The work actually started before the planes took off, with Product Management leading the team through virtual brainstorming, problem mapping, and solution prototyping sessions.
Once on site, we warmed up with some creativity-boosting Lego building. Then we broke into two teams, each with a different approach to the problem. One team focused on leveraging AI to break down and intelligently search complex and lengthy policy documents — some are more than 100 pages long! The other team built a workflow to surface customer-specific information to the claims adjuster, before using AI to index the resulting file.
“The teams went on two very different paths with the same goal in mind,” says Mike Barbera, senior product manager. “Later, we realized their solutions could be used together in the final product we prioritized. Seeing them split into two groups that came up with different, but complementary solutions to the same problem was really cool.”
After two days, the teams had produced software that claims adjusters could use to help them quickly find the details they needed and use them in communication with customers.
“It was so much fun to be in a room together, drawing on whiteboards, building with Legos, and programming our way through a hard problem,” says senior staff engineer Billie Jamison. “Using AI to scan documents and write code, could we build a proof of concept that actually provides end user value in just six hours of keyboard time? Yes, we could, and it was amazing.”
The best part was both teams found opportunities to leverage technologies they've never used before. With the freedom to experiment and without the expectations of delivery timelines, the team spent time with Claude Code, getting a feel for the pros and cons of AI-assisted coding and learning ways to better incorporate it into their daily routine. We also used Pinecone, a vector database, for the first time to help with our AI implementation, further improving our coding skills and knowledge.
In fact, figuring out how to break down massive PDF documents into a consumable and accessible format was its own win for the week. “A lot of our developers were exposed to technologies they'd never interacted with before, such as using Pinecone to store the text from documents and search them by similarity,” says Caroline Cohen, principal engineer. “We also used Claude Code to reevaluate our current code, as well as integrating with Claude's API to create prompts that appropriately search documents for connected information.”
The hackathon and Kin's integration of more AI tools has provided the opportunity for Product Management to get more involved in the development process than their day-to-day schedules normally allow. “As a PM, it was exciting to roll up my sleeves, help write some code, and rapidly build a solution alongside our engineers,” said senior product manager Pratik Amin. “AI, plus the willingness of our engineers to teach, really made that possible.”
An engineering team delivering two working prototypes in two days is a huge accomplishment all by itself, especially when those prototypes can be translated into a final product. But looking back, it feels like the real win for this group was getting to step outside of our normal routines and having the chance to be creative and have fun working together.
“I really enjoyed the collaborative energy and fast-paced problem-solving during the hackathon. It was exciting to turn ideas into a working project in a short amount of time,” said Mandy Gonzalez, software engineer. “It pushed me to think creatively and adapt quickly, which made the experience even more rewarding.”