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Gjensidige Builders – the history

Our aim was – and still is – to make it easier for us all to move faster and ensure consistent quality in all our digital efforts.

Digital ambitions

Here at Gjensidige, we have colleagues in six countries, who work on more than ten external websites and 200 applications. We're also organised differently across the company, with cross-functional product teams, projects disciplinary responsibilities and in-line operations.

With so many digital products and initiatives, we've had to find new and better ways to scale our operations and still deliver The Gjensidige Experience in everything we do.

Enabling easy, quick and consistent development across our digital efforts through solutions, tools and knowledge sharing

From GJEFF to @gje

To work smarter together, we created a CSS-library called GJEFF in 2014. This was a great start, but as GJEFF grew it became too big for one team to manage. We also struggled with a lack of version control, making it difficult for contributors to update the CSS with confidence. Code was split up into three different packages (CSS, HTML and JS) which had to be kept in sync manually across all teams.

So in 2018 we started replacing GJEFF with something else: Something that could work as building blocks for everyone and help us create sustainable and scalable solutions together. We made our new design system, gjensidige.design, which included @gje, our component library.

The start of Gjensidige Builders

In 2020 we decided to level up our work with the design system. By that point, we had accumulated a lot of technical debt, as well as a documentation page that was impossible to maintain over time.

So we set out to combine the power of the design system with the power of a modern web platform. The power of technology combined with power of disciplinary roles within design, content design and development, resulted in the birth of both in new solutions and tools and a new core team: Gjensidige Builders.

From 2020 until today

A lot has happened since our beginning in 2020. Gjensidige Builders has grown and gained increasing relevance in the design and development of digital initiatives across the Nordics in Gjensidige:

  • Accessing gjensidige.dk and gjensidige.se as early adopters of our modern web platform, Builders Platform, have created a closer relationship with colleagues in Denmark and Sweden
  • Designing and developing Gjensidige's new corporate identity for digital solutions has been a demanding but effective task. It has sparked closer collaboration across disciplines, teams and roles
  • Maintaining, improving and creating new Builders solutions has never been more important and relevant

The team behind the Builders solutions, team Builders, has different focuses and targets every quarter, which are represented in the team's OKRs. The overall mission still remains:

Helping people in Gjensidige with solutions, tools and knowledge sharing – enabling easy, quick and consistent design and development of digital solutions.

Want to deep dive into the Builders solutions?