Public sector services address pre-existing, often urgent needs. The product manager's role isn't marketing or demand generation, but rather simplifying access and reducing the administrative burden for a captive, often vulnerable, user base.
In Illinois, a better childcare voucher application would simply increase rejections due to a policy-mandated lack of a waitlist. This shows that improving a product without fixing underlying service and policy constraints can be counterproductive and even harmful.
In government, environments are often cluttered with redundant legacy systems. Instead of adding another, a more impactful approach is to remove existing ones, streamlining workflows, reducing costs, and lessening the burden on users and administrators.
Engineering problems have clear outcomes that can be reverse-engineered. Most policy challenges are design problems, requiring exploration and iteration to find a solution. Framing policy this way allows for flexibility and user-centered solutions rather than rigid compliance.
In government, failure is highly scrutinized. For the IRS Direct File project, success depended on securing executive sponsorship that allowed for testing, learning, and inevitable mistakes without derailing the entire initiative. This political cover is as crucial as the technical MVP.
Product teams often build on modern, powerful devices. In the public sector, users have varied access to technology. Success requires designing for older hardware, slower connections, and less tech-savvy users, ensuring accessibility for the most vulnerable populations.
Gaining consensus in a large government agency can be harder than building the product itself. The IRS Direct File team smartly launched their e-filing system to IRS employees first, using the product as a tool to build internal support before a public rollout.