COVID cohort (part I)

How our newest hires are navigating pandemic life

Building our team during a pandemic is a challenging prospect, particularly when the City needs our help. As the pandemic continues, the need for San Franciscans to access easy-to-use digital city services grows.

More of our new teammates describe the challenges of the pandemic era onboarding and the dynamic impact during these wild times.

Meet Claire Schlessinger

What’s your role on the team?

I started working with Digital Services in May as a Product Manager. Product Managers determine what the team should build to have the most impact on our users, and then shepherd the work from ideation to design to coding to launch (and then beyond).

What have you worked on?

I’m currently working on our affordable housing website while the team’s product manager is on parental leave. Once she returns, I’ll transition into a Technical Product Manager role, supporting technologies shared across multiple products to make the technical infrastructure used by different teams more efficiently.

Since I’ve started, I’ve helped guide team discussions around embedding more equity practices within our team culture and public-facing services and writing a research report on how community members responded to new features that our different teams are developing. (If you’re interested in giving us feedback on our work, please sign up to participate in research here!)

Anything that surprised you?

Working for the government during a state of emergency has allowed me to feel like I’m contributing, even if in a small, indirect way, to helping people get through this challenging event. Working with this team has revealed the truly caring, dedicated faces behind the coronavirus response, and I couldn’t be more grateful to have them as my peers.

Meet Sharon Huang

What do you do for San Francisco Digital Services?

I joined in April as a Bilingual Content Designer. Our content team builds content for San Franciscans. We write in plain English, at or below a 5th-grade reading level. I also support translating information into Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino.

What is it like starting 100% remote at SF Digital Services?

Thanks to technology, I feel more connected to my team than I had expected. For example, we have our daily 9 AM Zoom standups and weekly team check-ins. We use Trello and Airtable to help us track our projects. We created a #newbies channel in Slack for us to ask any admin or tech questions. We have a #lunch channel to pair us up with a random coworker for a virtual meetup weekly. We held a Zoom baby shower, team trivia, played Codenames and shared pictures of our home office setup. All of which, little by little, reassured me every day that I had made the right decision starting despite the pandemic.

Starting a new role during a pandemic is hard. It’s even harder when you’re a parent of young kids. I started part-time, working asynchronously for about 8 weeks. My days would alternate between library story times, meetings, lunch prep, arts and crafts, emails or Slack, and afternoon bike rides. It was difficult to ramp up. I didn’t want to feel guilty when working and not with my kids, or vice versa. But I did. I am grateful that my team has given me the flexibility and support when there is so much uncertainty regarding childcare and schools.

What have you worked on so far?

Since I started, I’ve audited our translations on SF.gov, cleared the backlog, and improved our translation workflow. I’ve also worked on a project that enables City staff to check their health daily before working. I want to help develop a repeatable process so we can move more departments over to SF.gov. The list goes on, and it makes me excited to get up every morning.

Meet Matthew Gibbery

What do you do?

I joined Digital Services in late February as the team’s second Service Designer. My job is to think about the end-to-end process of the services we deliver and identify how we can improve the resident and staff experiences.

What are you working on?

Beginning a new job during a pandemic has its challenges, but it also creates many opportunities to help out; I went straight to improving the City’s permitting process.

Since San Francisco only accepted paper architectural drawings for its building permits, the Permit Center’s closure due to COVID-19 meant the approval of new construction in the city stopped. With this pause, contractors weren’t able to work, homeowners couldn’t finish or repair their houses, and the City lost a big source of revenue from the fees. By creating an online path for submitting and reviewing digital drawings, we’ve enabled the City to start building again and the San Franciscans in construction to go back to work.

What’s different about working during a pandemic?

As it turns out, offices aren’t all that necessary to team culture or cohesiveness. There’s a special kind of closeness you feel from virtual tours of teammates’ homes, getting to meet their kids and pets, or working long hours on complex, important problems.

At a time when so much feels out of our control, I’m grateful to be playing a small part alongside incredible teammates to help our community get through this pandemic.

San Francisco Digital Services’ ‘COVID cohort’ is Part I of a two-part exploration of what it means to live and work in the City and County of San Francisco during the pandemic.