Developing state government strategy for digital products
Problem.
Rapid team expansion (from 60 to 120) and associated growth pains
New ministerial cabinet and new ministerial priorities
Emerging problems of silos, misalignment and lack of understanding of team purpose
No clear connection between our team priorities and a cascade of government strategies
My role.
As a group design lead, I created an original strategy research proposal, facilitated co-design activities with business customers and teams, and produced the final instructional document.
Together with a group product manager lead, we worked with other government units to gather data, ensured alignment up and across, built relationships with senior stakeholders and promoted our work.
Outcome.
Executive and Senior leadership buy-in
Defined customer needs and segments
Product portfolio vision and strategy
New team formation to ensure the priorities are executed
Culture shift amongst team members
Making sense of data
As a first step of the process, we looked at various quantitate data available to us: we used data from our own data base as well as utilised available government reports. It helped us to get a better understanding in which areas customers require government assistance - on a scale.
We saw an emergence of a customer segment require the most of government support, and we digged deeper to understand its challenges.
Understanding customer needs
Through a series of co-design workshops with customers and customer representative teams, we learned the base set of customer blockers, needs, desired emotions and goals. A mix of quantitative and qualitative research allowed us to create a functional Customer Archetype that should provide some alignment to our product teams.
Co-creating strategy
We involved the whole team of 100+ product specialists in a series of workshop to help us to define our vision, strategy and team formation. This process ensured everyone’s buy-in and change in culture amongst the teams. It was also an opportunity for the teams to look at the problems from a “balcony view“ and see how interconnected our ecosystem is.
Output
As an output of this project, I created an instructional document that provides guidance on who we are serving, what we will do to achieve our vision, how will we keep ourselves accountable and how we are aligned to a cascade of other government strategies.
Most importantly, we’ve seen a positive change in culture amongst teams: more and more we’ve seen teams tackling their individual product strategies and seeking opportunities for alignment to ensure we achieve the vision.
