Debugging the Nominee Flow Failure at Acko Under Production Pressure
Traced and fixed a critical production regression affecting insurance claim creation, under live user pressure.
Suraj Nanda
SDE 2 at Acko
From their time as
SDE 2
Acko • 2025
Overview
A change made to Acko's endorsement and claim creation API introduced an unintended regression: the nominee onboarding flow broke, and users were unable to raise insurance claims. The issue surfaced quickly on social media, with users posting negative feedback publicly.
The Story
A change made to Acko's endorsement and claim creation API introduced an unintended regression: the nominee onboarding flow broke, and users were unable to raise insurance claims. The issue surfaced quickly on social media, with users posting negative feedback publicly.
Suraj was on-call and dropped his current sprint work to prioritize the fix. The challenge was that the connection between the API change and the nominee flow failure was not immediately obvious: the developer who made the change had not anticipated that it would affect the event handling downstream in the nominee onboarding path.
He traced the issue through logs and debugging, identified that the recent change had failed to handle an event that the nominee flow depended on, and fixed it. The fix restored claim creation for affected users.
The incident reinforced his approach to on-call work: assess business impact first, move fast on critical user-facing failures, and document the root cause clearly so the same failure mode does not recur.