A Singaporean in San Francisco

In June this year, I left the San Francisco City government’s digital team after five years of service. I was its first Director of Product Management. When I joined, it was a small team that the City’s first Chief Digital Services Officer Carrie Bishop had hired from elsewhere in the City and from the private sector. When I left, it was the largest — in terms of number of full time employees, as well as annual budget — municipal digital services team in the United States.

I did not start out expecting to be a public servant. After all, I had spent most of my career starting and scaling tech companies. I was a startup founder, early stage startup employee: not the sort of profile to join the public service anywhere.

The attraction to what was barely known as ‘public interest tech’ then was that I had already seen this model work well in my home country, Singapore, with its GovTech and GovTech-adjacent teams. I’d used their products and services in more ways than I could name. I was curious about whether I could do similar work in my adopted city, San Francisco, too.

When I joined in late 2019, there was no easily available model for what it meant to ‘do product management in government’. Anywhere! I didn’t have articles to read; nor a number of people to speak to about what their jobs entailed, and what challenges they faced. What best practices I could be aware of, or case studies I could learn from.

Eventually, I did find that community of practice in California and other state governments, in similar teams across the country, as well as at the federal level, and also in international settings, such as in the UK and Singapore. But we were still a minority compared to other types of tech-in-government roles.

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Pandemic-era product management

The outbreak of Covid-19 in the early days thrust us all into action. Anyone who had any skill at any level of government seemed to come together quickly and meaningfully to try to build and ship services that would help. On my team, we built and expanded sf.gov, the City’s main website (one out of more than 200, when I joined) to deliver information about shelter-in-place, social distancing, and later, vaccine services.

I felt lucky that our City gave us enough budget, resources and autonomy to do so: many smaller cities did not have the capacity. We built thousands of pages on our websites, launched dozens of services that disbursed millions of dollars to employers as well as to San Francisco residents who needed support. We tried to close the gap on case and workflow management that staff struggled with, so that they could process cases faster. We conducted user research and testing, built brand new backend services that could communicate with millions of people, tried to deliver vital health information in plain English as well as in all of the major languages spoken by San Francisco residents. 

Crunch time in a public health emergency felt different from crunch time at an early stage startup: getting something wrong meant something bad might happen to someone, not that we might lose money. 

Investing in product

Product leadership and experienced product managers helped make this happen. While every City’s digital services team is different, in San Francisco we invested in product management, service and UX design, software development, alongside content strategy, translators, and operational support.

Our size and budget, as well as our team’s experience across the public and private sectors, meant that we were able to build and buy software at a high level: from working across multiple legacy databases to building microservices that work with all of them, to working with proprietary as well as open source technology, our team was able to ship user-friendly services that made a difference.

It was an exhilarating adventure. I am thankful to the City and County of San Francisco for investing in digital public infrastructure, and in the people they need to make this happen. San Francisco residents and businesses are all the better for it.

While there are still some gaps in terms of what we can offer, given the scale of the City’s services, I’ve been grateful to hear community organizers, small business, and individuals alike tell me about how they used our work to apply for grants, get information in major languages, or to apply for other City support and funding. 

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Sometimes, people ask me what it means to lead a product team in City government. I usually say: like every team in every sector, it depends on what kind of team you have and what resources you have. Product management can mean different things to different people, at the task level. But at the strategic level, it is the same thing. Good product leadership helps you decide what to do, when to do it, who to do it, and how to do it. Great product leadership helps you decide what not to do, and understand why. 

I’m proud of the work that we accomplished at San Francisco Digital Services. I hope that the product management practice I helped start there can continue to thrive, and to inspire other city teams.

Adrianna Tan has more than 15 years’ experience leading product management teams at startups, open source teams, government and nonprofit. Previously, she built the product team at San Francisco Digital Services for 5 years. She is now working on helping governments and nonprofit do product management and AI better.

To read our past coverage of San Francisco Digital Services, click here.