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June 13, 2023 - January 1, 2024
The mindset of “find all the requirements, fulfill all the requirements” is engrained in IT teams, policy teams, legal teams, compliance teams, contracting teams, purchasing teams, oversight bodies, and agency leadership.
Making room for product management, and the iterative, user-centric practices that come with it, is long, hard work.
Staged rollouts that don’t try to serve all users equally from day one can be seen as inconsistent with values of equity and inclusion, even if they serve everyone better in practice.
management, or whatever other name you want to give it, is not only helpful but necessary to honor the core values of American government. It is not an excuse to go rogue; it is a path to getting the outcomes the democratic process has agreed upon.
Fundamentally, a product manager is someone who hears everyone—this compliance issue here, that niche concern there—but puts that panoply of interests into the proper context. A good product manager never forgets whom government is supposed to serve.
paperwork favors the powerful.
Many people assume the tools of the digital trade are bits and bytes. But walls, markers, flip charts, and sticky notes often play a more important role in digital work than screens and keyboards.
Policy people can be secretly intimidated by digital teams, worried that they’ll look stupid when technical topics come up, and the reverse can be just as true. But there’s something about little slips of colored paper—maybe because they remind us of kindergarten—that puts everyone on the same level.
The problem is that issuing orders, especially from a place of disdain or disrespect, only reinforces blind obedience to the hierarchy.
I’ve talked with dozens of people like Natalie who work in catalyst roles around state, local, and federal government, and they all have their own Yadiras—the career public servants who not only enable change when the opportunity arises but keep it going after the tech surges, task forces, and angry politicians leave.
That common language is neither tech-speak nor legalese.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve come to the realization that what I’m holding is really six hundred pages of untested assumptions. I’m just going to set it aside for a while.”
I often hear that tech changes so fast it’s difficult to keep up. But what government needs to keep up with is not tech but people.
But our dialogue with those who represent us shouldn’t start—or even end—with technology. It has to start with what people need.
Oracle sees digital talent exercising judgment instead of blindly following process as a threat to its business.
“I once had a negotiation with Oracle where their opening bid was $17 million and mine was $1 million,” he told me. “Where did you end up?” I asked. “$1.5 million.” Most cities don’t have someone with that kind of substantive expertise to go toe-to-toe with tech vendors. So they pay closer to Oracle’s opening offer.
“We need to bring technologists into all levels of government, so digital practices and concerns are built into policy decisions from the beginning.
It turns out that if the tech people you bring in spend time understanding the problem instead of trying to apply predetermined solutions, government actually buys less tech, not more, and at a lower cost, while delivering better outcomes.
“We’re going to learn what we need to learn and proudly bid again. Thank you for changing the rules.” Profit motives might make concrete boats seem attractive, but vendors can be as motivated by impact as any public servant.
Today, our low expectations for government services play right into Oracle’s hands.
More than any other agency, the US Postal Service is responsible for literal delivery. With covidtests.gov, it came through beautifully.
When Mary Ann Brody let Dominic try the redesigned VA health care application, he responded that it was “so much better than the government one,” despite having just been told it was the new government website.
You don’t have to know much about how government works to guess that the key people behind the original VA health care application, the one Dominic described as “spikes and IEDs,” were purchasing officers. The revised version Mary Ann’s team built could only be the work of designers and developers.
That’s where many of us tend to think tech talent belongs. But we can think otherwise.
In no way do they prohibit public servants like Yadira Sánchez from deciding what to do instead of just handing the whole question off to purchasing officers.
They do it well because they have the internal know-how and authority to create dialogue between policymakers and delivery teams, instead of just blindly following directives.
Every one of us can do our part by expecting digital competence from our government and by believing that the highest and best use of our country’s most talented technologists is in public service.
Product management is key to avoiding the trap of “find all the requirements, fulfill all the requirements,” but savvy vendors can and do provide excellent product managers—as long as there is an empowered and engaged “product owner” within government who can work with them to decide on and authorize smart tradeoffs.
Can government teams aim to serve the people in a way that builds trust and faith in the institution, or will they forever labor diligently and thoroughly to meet thousands of arcane requirements without fulfilling their actual purpose?
“You can no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they understand economics or ideology or propaganda.”
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
If you mandate interoperable architectures, agencies will be able to share data. But government is a vast, interconnected, complex, adaptive system made up of countless subsystems that connect in ways that are rarely fully seen or understood.
Deterministic policy solutions invite unintended consequences.
Important
OUR ELECTED LEADERS keep thinking in terms of money, regulations, and oversight because those are the levers they have most immediately at hand.
Building the capability we need does take funding. But it should be spent on people before contracts, operating expenditures before capital expenditures.
It’s a government that feels smaller but gets more done.
Remember, the people putting together a request for proposal for a $600 million project are supposed to say with great certainty what development teams will be delivering ten to twenty years into the future. This is, simply put, impossible. No appropriation should ask for this kind of delusional plan.
Waterfall is a great fit for an institution without a core competency in digital, since it requires only complying with processes rather than exercising judgment. But it does not deliver software—or government—that works for people.
They assume, to quote the agile manifesto, that “working software is the primary measure of progress.”
Our oversight functions must reward that judgment, not the checkmarks.
The best solution of all would be to hold public servants accountable to outcomes over process.
Government leadership has typically seen implementation as a second-class job, and as the world moved into the digital age, the policy class mistook that profound change for a mere shift in the tools of implementation.
To most people, digital services are policy.
Not only is government a monopoly but the services it provides are the ones that matter most.
We can no longer afford not to learn new tricks.
We celebrated. What comes next is merely “operational in nature.” If we want to escape that fate, on climate or any other existential issue we face, implementation can no longer be policy’s poor cousin.
