Bloomer Talk: Triana interviews Vicki about civic tech delivery, equity, and urgency at Bloom Works
Vicki Kidd is a Product and Delivery Manager at Bloom, a civic technology consultancy that helps create accessible and equitable government digital services. She is based out of Atlanta, Georgia and has been with Bloom for almost 2 years. Vicki and I just helped wrap up one of Bloom’s longest-running projects with the City and County of San Francisco. I sat down with Vicki to learn more about her current projects, hear her reflections on our work in civic tech, and learn about her recent session at the Code for America Summit.
Triana: For those who might not know, what does a Product and Delivery Manager do?
Vicki: I like that Bloom has come up with “Product and Delivery Manager” because it encapsulates a lot of hidden work. I think the product piece is really thinking about the vision we’re working towards and how we use the team’s skill set in service of that vision. Then the delivery piece touches on stakeholder engagement and making sure all this good work that we do actually lands and in a way where it’s not just going to be a report that sits on someone’s computer.
One of the things I often try to do in my projects is have conversations with stakeholders about what we can deliver that is useful, in part because I hate doing work that no one is going to look at that’s a waste of our time — and in part because we do all this good work but we want it to be impactful and actionable for the client.
Triana: I really love that description and the emphasis on, not just building a thing, but making sure it’s actually usable. Can you tell us about a project you’re working on right now?
Vicki: I’m working on a project with the Vermont Department of Labor. In the last couple of years there’s been an influx of federal funding for making improvements and modernization to unemployment insurance (UI) processes, language, equity, and things like that. A lot of state UI systems were overloaded during the pandemic and had to figure out effective ways to deliver not just regular unemployment, but also pandemic unemployment assistance, to people who desperately needed it. That kicked off a lot of modernization efforts in the world of UI.
I’m currently working with a team in Vermont to improve their holistic system around UI, with an eye towards equity. What aspects of the journey to receiving or not receiving benefits (because not everyone is necessarily eligible) are challenging for specific populations? What inhibits their ability to get the benefits they need and deserve? How can we make it easier for people to get the money that they are entitled to?
Triana: Such important work with really, really big impact potential. What types of equity concerns have come up in this project?
Vicki: Any and everyone might need unemployment insurance (UI) at some point in their lives, and it is an incredibly emotionally difficult position to be in. The language that we use around UI is a lot of legalese, which is very intimidating. Even if there is legalese that we need to include, we try and make sure that there are plain language summaries. In terms of access, it’s pretty common to have a singular entry point into the system: you have to go online to do X, Y, or Z, or you have to call on the phone to initiate your claim. But not everyone has access to a laptop or even the internet. If there are long hold times and you are on a pay-by-minute phone plan, then it’s very expensive to stay on hold. One of the biggest difficulties in making systems like this more equitable is just how many perspectives you need to speak to and address to make sure there is a streamlined way for anyone, regardless of their circumstances or their means, to be able to access that system.
Triana: That sounds so challenging and highlights the difference between equality and equity. It’s especially important to consider and support people that are the most vulnerable and under-resourced. Like you’re saying, if you don’t have a smartphone, if you don’t have internet, all this is going to be that much harder. I read from the Pew Research Center that 40% of low income people don’t have broadband internet access at home.
That’s such a high number. A lot of us, especially working in tech, take internet access for granted (among many other things).
Vicki: Yeah, we’re just sitting down at our computers and trying to solve situations that are so different from our own, so there is just this cognitive dissonance.
Triana: Agreed! What’s a lesson from a past project that you hope to bring with you into your next projects?
Vicki: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how people don’t experience government services in the discrete way we think about them. This is something we were talking about a lot during our work together with San Francisco. We need to think about how people are receiving the services, not necessarily how we’ve segmented the delivery of those services.
I’ve been trying to zoom out from the project level when preparing for my recent talk at the Code for America Summit where this was a central theme. Sometimes we find that legislation or programs or processes are at odds with user needs. How do we rectify that and find something that honors the intention of the legislation or the program, but better reflects the reality of the user’s needs? Sometimes that requires reconfiguring how we’ve scoped out pieces of the work. Sometimes we’ve separated things that are more intrinsically linked than we originally thought, and we might need to bring them back together to be successful.
Triana: Yes, that’s incredibly important. You mentioned you presented at the Code for America Summit recently. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you shared and how folks can learn more?
Vicki: I co-presented with one of our partners from the Colorado Digital Service and the Behavioral Health Administration. I presented with Abigail Fisher, a really wonderful civic designer. We put together this talk, Threading the Needle: When well-intentioned Legislation is at odds with user needs, where we dove into a case study that we worked on together. There was some really well-intentioned legislation that mandated specific reporting from providers, and through our research we quickly learned that we really need to go back to the drawing board. The talk explored the case study and how we navigated the project pivots required, and the difficult conversations that had to go into resetting not just the scope of our work, but the roadmap that we were laying out for the client.
Triana: That was a great session and seems like a really good example of, not only the work that we do at Bloom, but also the work of a Product and Deliver Manager. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into civic tech and what you were doing before you joined Bloom?
Vicki: I stumbled and looked up and realized I was in civic tech. It was not intentional in any way. A lot of people in civic tech used to work directly in government and then stepped just outside to be in the civic tech consulting space. That was not my experience. During my masters, I was working at a policy lab one of my professors had spun up. We were working in the civic tech space, but more focused on helping governments better understand and de-silo their own administrative data across departments. We wanted to help them learn more holistically from the wealth of information they have about people, how they are using services, what they need, what’s working for them, and what isn’t. I stayed in this space for a while, and then suddenly everybody was saying the word civic tech, but it certainly wasn’t anything I sought out intentionally.
Triana: What advice do you have for other people starting to work in civic tech?
Vicki: Government is often the last line of defense for people navigating really difficult situations. If someone is using public behavioral health services, it’s likely that there weren’t a lot of other options available to them. In this space of really directly impactful work, it often feels very dire and important. And it is. But that can make it easy to burn out and overwork ourselves to the point where we aren’t able to sustain our work.
So I always try to ask myself and my teammates about a deliverable that’s coming up: Will someone die tomorrow if I don’t do this today? I think it’s important to remind ourselves that there is urgency, but we don’t need to fabricate additional urgency on top of the baseline urgency. A report delivered tomorrow versus today is not going to be life or death. If it would mean that the person writing the report is able to sustain their own work-life balance, we should deliver it tomorrow instead of today. That will help us avoid a lot of the burnout that we see in this space and that’s something that I really appreciate about Bloom. That mentality feels shared to me.
Triana: I appreciate that distinction that you’re making. While the work we’re doing is really important, we are not frontline workers. All this work is urgent, but it’s relative. Sustaining it for the long haul is more important than some deadline that we have. Speaking of work-life balance, what are you reading right now outside of work?
Vicki: I’m slowly plodding through a book on the history of Hamas. It’s called Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi. It describes the history of the region through the precursors and formation of Hamas as an organization that is fighting for the liberation of Palestine. It’s shedding a lot of the misconceptions that I had held about Hamas and the region as a whole. It has felt incredibly important to me to take the time to learn not just what is going on in Palestine today, but what has happened over the last century to lead to this point.
It is the same as how I go about my work — I never take one perspective as fact. We unpack assumptions, explore lived experiences, and ask questions. To me, that is the only equitable way to move forward.
Thanks so much to Vicki for the illuminating perspective on working in civic tech. Her journey inspires us to think about how we can all contribute to more effective and compassionate public services. Check out Vicki’s session from last month’s Code for America summit!
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
