From Private to Public

Stephanie is a Human-Centered Design Specialist on the Colorado Digital Service team. She also serves as the Vice President of the Technologists for Public Good. This post represents the personal views of the author and not their current or former employers.

Before I joined the Colorado Digital Service (CDS) as its first User Experience (UX) Designer, I worked for a medicare tech startup and a multinational software and services company. In both of those prior environments, my colleagues valued and deeply understood modern software development practices like product strategy, iterative development, and human-centered design. The cultures revolved around cross-functional teams, working meetings, asynchronous communication, and of course, moving fast. When I joined the state, I thought what I had experienced in those environments could easily transfer to government. If successful, these processes could result in happier, healthier teams that delivered better quality technology products and services. Over time, I learned more about how this translation doesn’t always work as expected.

On day one, I learned my first lesson in a meeting with an important government partner. I introduced myself as a UX designer only to be met with a blank stare and a question, ‘what is UX?’ In that moment, imposter syndrome quickly set in when I made the realization that I had never worked in an environment in which I had to define my skill set and convince people of its value.

Over time, I learned to craft my pitch. I described UX as a framework for creating experiences and products that are centered around the needs of the people that are impacted by that work. I often had to broaden the perception of UX which is regularly conflated with User Interface (UI) design. I had to demonstrate other valuable disciplines under the UX umbrella including user research, product strategy, and service design.

At the same time, I had to be careful to make the foundational concepts of UX approachable and not inadvertently condescending to government partners. In my experience, people regularly take jobs in government because they care about mission-oriented work and delivering services that are valuable to their community. Recognizing and aligning with the expertise and care that already exists, makes it easy to advocate for UX.

A few months later, I was working on the COVID-19 response at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment where people had been deployed from different teams and organizations to work together. Though everyone was working on something, there was no coordination, strategy, or sense of team. When CDS was asked for our opinion about how to organize, my colleague and I gave recommendations based on what had proven successful in previous technology companies:

• Place people into small cross-functional teams and give them autonomy to define their work so that it ladders up to larger strategies and outcomes.
• Encourage teams to use asynchronous methods of communication like chat rooms to reduce the number of meetings and increase transparency.
• Work in sprint cycles so that value can be delivered iteratively over time.
• Establish processes like stand-ups, retrospectives, and demo days so that teams can build relationships with one another and cross-pollinate ideas.

As we began implementing those recommendations, we facilitated sessions to help people brainstorm and prioritize work, we organized our work in sprints using a project management tool, we instituted team chat rooms, and gave everyone a place on a team. However, over time, participation dropped from every new process we instituted.

However, over time, participation dropped from every new process we instituted.

There were a few people who became hooked, but for the most part, people continued with the ways they were used to working. There were systemic barriers that keep them from changing behavior and the way they fundamentally thought about the role of technology. We learned that just because something works in a private sector technology company does not mean it can naturally apply to the public sector. For one, government agencies regularly perceive their primary focus as delivering programs and services. Technology is a secondary focus.

After the end of an engagement, an agency partner that a colleague and I had worked closely with gave us feedback,

“Even [the term] retro[spective]…I get the word, but in public health world I’d call it a debrief. It doesn’t prohibit you from participating, but the fast pace of the work, it can feel intimidating and inaccessible if you don’t feel comfortable asking.”

This was a lightbulb moment for us. We thought we had done a good job of slowing down and meeting people where they were just to realize that the language we were using alienated our partners and made them feel intimidated.

Each of these moments were powerful lessons that I continue to carry with me throughout the rest of my term of service at the state. I’m proud that our team hired a second UX designer after seeing the value and opportunities for that work and that we’ve inspired other state agencies to seek out this role as well. We invested time and energy into creating written, presentation, and training materials to help people onboard to the concepts we advocate for. We reframed our perspective and found ourselves focusing less on the technology and more on the people that enable the work. We’ve leveraged opportunities to grow UX concepts through disciplines that already exist in government and to enable people to adopt these processes into their own practice. Lastly, we began using language mapping exercises, deferring when we could to language that our agency partners were comfortable using.

One of our team’s core values is “Government was here before us, and will be here after us.” To work in service of improving government technology is to be forever adaptable, willing to learn from the moments that didn’t go as well as you had planned and to keep going.

Have you used something similar with your team and/or agency partners? My colleagues and I are gathering stories to include in a collection of learnings for new digital service teams. We’d love to hear from you! Email us at digital-service-start-ups@googlegroups.com if you have a similar story to share.