A good head of product is a visionary who can combine their ideas with feedback from users, leadership and the industry in general, then build a strategy to achieve overall technology goals. That describes Keith Katz at Tinubu Surety. “As with any product leadership role, I’m the person in the middle of the web,” he says, explaining his multifaceted job. “I also have to consider what features we need, in what order, and what form they should take. A key part of making great Surety software is to pay a lot of attention to user feedback, and rely on the experienced experts that we have at Tinubu and our customers. Then the product team decides what we’re doing and engineering decides how we’re doing it.”
To maintain an industry-leading Surety platform that delivers optimal performance and aligns with emerging trends, the software must be continuously upgraded. But doing that in a way that brings new benefits to existing users without creating disruption is a delicate balance. That’s one of Katz’s considerations as he oversees the Surety product roadmap, which, as he details here, is full of new features, and one major development that will positively impact all clients.
What new Tinubu features are you excited about?
One of the things we’re adding is a dedicated underwriting experience with a more streamlined workflow. We already have great underwriting features, but customer feedback has been that they are a little disjointed, so we’re putting them together in a way that almost creates a new feature. We’re taking numerous tools that exist in different parts of the platform, and putting them all together so the data really flows. That will be later this year.
What is on Tinubu’s product roadmap over the next year?
There are two main things that we’re doing. They actually tie together, but I’ll talk about them separately.
First, we are modernizing our carrier platform, Tinubu Surety Solution for Carriers (TSC) using SaaS [Software as a Service] best practices. Our customers are already starting to see the benefits. It is not what you would think of as a migration. We are effectively refactoring, rewriting and modernizing the whole TSC platform incrementally, which avoids disruption for the users. So by the time we get through this process, there will be the Ship of Theseus question—is it still the same platform if we’ve replaced every bit of it, component by component, as we go? Of course, that doesn’t matter: it’ll just be better.
As we make these changes the platform will get a new, streamlined UI. Then we will be merging technologies from TSC and our broker/agent platform, Tinubu Surety for Brokers & Agents (TSBA). We’ll bring them together into one platform so we can deliver a lot of great new features for users, and create more efficiencies for them, too. There will be a single, amazing bond workflow that is appropriate for the user that is logged in; unified best in class account and client management features, and automatically populating carrier rates and details. When I look at what TSBA and TSC are capable of, there’s 80% that’s very similar, but delivered in a different way with a different experience. So with the new, merged platform, the functionality users are used to having will be there, along with a lot of other features and capabilities. There will be more automation, even less manual entry, and a much better workflow and UI. We did UI previews with about 30 customers at our annual Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. The response was great. We had overall positive feedback, and have taken that feedback into the next round of designs.
When will these updates happen?
It’s an aggressive timeline. The TSC modernization effort should be be largely complete in 2026. Then we’ll turn to merging the platforms: which will go much faster because we’re doing a significant percentage of the groundwork while we modernize TSC.
If someone is thinking of getting the Tinubu Surety platform now, why wouldn’t they just wait until all the upgrades are done?
Because you’ll get all of the value that we deliver today—which is a lot. And then you’ll simply get more over time. There are no changes being made that would make you think “Tinubu doesn’t do what I need now, but it will in a year, so I’ll wait.” If it doesn't do what you need now, you’re unlikely to want it in a year either, because the current platform already serves the needs of some of the biggest carriers, brokers, and agencies in the Surety industry. That said, if a client has a core business need that is so unique that the platform today isn't right for them, they can talk to us so we can plan together how to partner for their success.
Another reason to get Tinubu now is that we’re not building a completely separate system, then migrating existing customers into it, hoping we get it right. We’re making incremental changes, so there’s no disruption for the users. So there is no reason to wait—jump in. Start getting everything that we offer today and you’ll just get more over time.
