Working at OGP: Serving the Users as a Product Operations Specialist
With the increase in apps and user requests, product operations is a small but growing team at Open Government Products. We speak to one of our OG’s, Jackson, who has been working with us for more than a year since graduating from university.
Tell us more about yourself.
My name is Jackson and I am a product operations specialist at Open Government Products. I am currently working on Forms and Isomer. I handle mostly the user side of things on both products.
Reveal a fun fact (or two) about yourself.
I do cheerleading and I like to watch anime during my free time.
What have you been working on lately?
I’m currently coordinating the migration from GitHub to our new content management system (CMS) for Isomer users and looking at various ticketing SaaS solutions for FormSG to allow for better user support experience.
How did you venture into product operations?
I was dabbling with product support during my internship at a startup, which made me realise that there is a demand for product operations. Eventually I applied for my current role after graduating from university.
What do you think it takes to be a product operations specialist?
We need to be understanding and patient as our role is inclined towards the user-facing aspect of products. Also, at the same time, we need to be daring enough to try out different processes until we find something that really works for the team.
What is the most exciting part about your job?
Being able to interact with various agencies and understand their workflows when using our products to make their life easier.
What is your most memorable work experience so far?
Back when I was supporting the RedeemSG team, I was tasked to come up with guidelines for the product escalation process. In order to do so, I had to travel down to various locations for our mobile app user trials.
I was surprised that whatever I had expected in my mind was so far off from reality. For example, there exists a group of users who are not well-versed in using emails to report app issues. As such, we had to factor in such use cases in our processes so that we were able to be more inclusive and accommodate their needs.
How would you describe OGP’s culture?
OGP culture is fun and open, but can be very fast paced sometimes. Internally, we have a fortnightly buddy pairing system called “Donut” where you get paired with a random colleague every cycle. This is fun to me because it provides an opportunity for me to get to know more of my colleagues who are not working on the same project, especially since the team is expanding.
In your opinion, what makes OGP unique?
I was given a lot of autonomy (even as a fresh graduate) at work, which in and of itself makes this government agency very unique.
What motivates you to go to work everyday?
Being able to help as many users as possible and knowing that my involvement plays a part of something bigger.
Interested in working on tech for public good? Find out more and work with us!
