Prinita Mukherjee, Senior Manager (Forward Planning), People's Association, Singapore

1) What does public service mean to you? Can you share more about your role in the public sector?

Public service, to me, is a career choice I renew daily.

It is the quiet promise to listen deeply, to notice what works and what does not, to have a bias towards action, and to keep showing up to do work with communities, not just for them. 

It is about embracing ambiguity when confronted with complex issues that do not fall neatly within bureaucratic lines, and constantly striving to do better for Singapore. 

In my current role as part of a lean forward planning team in PA’s Engagement Group, we see our work as product development for community engagement.

Like product developers who study how the world has changed and adapt accordingly, we lead the thinking and strategy to scan the horizon, anticipate emerging trends, and design “products” (e.g. engagement models) in response, to ensure our interventions remain relevant in meeting evolving community needs.

We then move along the product development lifecycle to partner ground units to experiment, rollout pilots, iterate and scale what works. 

2) Tell us about a project you championed. What impact did it have on the community?

At PA’s inaugural hackathon last year, my team came together in the spirit of making good trouble for what matters.

We championed a volunteer management product, starting from a posture of humility by listening to stakeholders on the ground who were overwhelmed by fragmented systems, manual tracking, and the need for last‑minute activations.  

Our team confronted a hard truth: our community volunteers don’t drift away because they stop caring, sometimes the system makes them feel uncertain, and even invisible. 

We uncovered a “black hole” between registration and deployment, which volunteers fall into. 

Together, we learnt to trust the process and lean into the messiness.

We journeyed with our users to identify their pain points, designed a new workflow, and rapidly prototyped a one‑stop product that harmonised volunteer data for better knowledge management and continuity, reduced manual administrative steps, and streamlined end-to-end engagement of volunteers with clearer touchpoints from registration to post-deployment.   

The real impact goes beyond productivity gains, it allows ground officers to get time back to do what actually sustains community and shifts how they can show up for volunteers, with clearer follow‑ups and better matching to interests. 

This translates to more sustained participation, stronger relationships, and ultimately, communities that feel seen, supported, and valued. 

3) As a young professional, how has your unique background or perspective allowed you to identify a solution that others in your organisation might have overlooked?

Coming into public service with a background in social anthropology, I instinctively look out for the invisible and what happens in the spaces between systems and people.

This includes paying attention to the workarounds people build when systems don’t serve them.  

During the hackathon, while it was tempting to jump to building a brand-new tool with good UX design, my team deliberately stayed with the problem longer to drill down to the root cause and ensure we solve the right issue, rather than a symptom of it. 

During this process, we were struck by how much friction came from fragmented data, missing touchpoints and invisible manual labour on the ground.  

Having worked both upstream in planning and transformation roles in HQ, as well as at a CC on the ground during the first half of my career at PA, I could see that the real opportunity was not adding another layer of process, but integrating what already existed. 

I am drawn to double-loop thinking, asking not just how we could speed this up, but questioning what assumptions and models are creating the friction. 

That perspective helped me reframe the problem, from doing more to removing obstacles, creating space for ground officers to focus on what the system cannot automate, exercising judgment and building trust to cultivate a meaningful volunteering experience.  

4) What is your personal strategy for staying motivated when managing heavy workloads and tight deadlines?

I protect my creative energy by returning to two things: purpose and proximity. 

When bureaucracy starts to feel heavy, I stay close to users and stay in motion, deliberately grounding myself in real problems faced by communities, walking through user journeys to learn what drives their behaviour, and stress‑testing ideas in small pilots.  

In my team, we rely on short, iterative ‘Think-Do-Learn’ loops to start small through trying experiments, learn fast, adapt, course-correct, and repeat, rather than waiting for the perfect conditions.  

I also try to borrow creative energy by collaborating widely across the stakeholder landscape.

I believe the fastest way to get unstuck and make a breakthrough is to get fresh perspectives, helping us to check our own assumptions, connect dots that would never otherwise meet, and unlock new ways forward. 

Overall, the idea is to treat bureaucracy like product constraints, real but not final. To me, innovation is not a simple rebellion against bureaucracy. 

Counterintuitively, it entails a lot of discipline. I believe we can sustain our innovative spirit in public service by navigating bureaucracy with curiosity, the courage to own up to mistakes and course-correct, and a clear sense of why the work we do matters. 

5) If you had just one area to invest in to accelerate transformation in the public sector (regulation, technology, talent, etc.), which one would you choose and why?

If I could invest in one lever, it would be building the capabilities of our people and giving all officers the confidence and craft to enact change. 

Technology and policy can enable change, but this will only land when officers can do the hard middle: horizon-scan, make sense of complexity, prototype responsibly, measure outcomes, and iterate based on evidence. 

Our rapidly changing operating environment demands new muscles in systems thinking, adopting an agile approach, and the ability to translate strategy into tested products citizens will actually adopt. 

I believe the best public service teams operate like strong product teams: they understand users deeply, test assumptions early, measure outcomes honestly, and scale with discipline. 

When people develop these capabilities, transformation stops being episodic or dependent on a few individual champions, it becomes embedded and repeatable.  

6) What is your greatest ambition as you grow in your public service career?

My ambition is to help build the next generation of public service as one that functions like a learning system: deeply human, evidence-led, and future-ready, to be able to adapt without losing our moral compass.

I also hope to make experimentation feel safer and more normalised through real measurement, honest learning from failures, and clear pathways to scale for real change. 

Ultimately, I hope to grow into a leader who builds these capabilities at the systems level, so transformation outlasts any one person. 

7) What is a “universal value” that connects everyone in your department – from interns to directors – and how do you use that to drive collaboration?

A universal value that cuts across my team is a deep sense of stewardship of outcomes and shared ownership, the belief that our work only matters if it helps others succeed. 

No one works in isolation and ideas are shaped collectively across roles and seniority. 

We drive collaboration by framing work around common outcomes, creating safe spaces for interns to question assumptions, and for directors to learn alongside teams.

A universal value that cuts across my team is a deep sense of stewardship of outcomes and shared ownership, the belief that our work only matters if it helps others succeed. 

When people feel trusted and invested in a shared purpose, collaboration becomes natural rather than forced.   

8) What is the best piece of advice you’ve got for the next generation of public servants?

Someone once told me to stay curious, and when in doubt, to run the smallest responsible experiment that teaches you something real.  

Public service is complex, and it feels easy to default to inherited processes, wait for certainty, or confuse being busy with impact.  

It also feels easy to criticise the status quo, but the rarest resource is not ideas which might not survive contact with reality. The most meaningful work comes from us continually asking why, probing deeper, and being willing to learn in motion.  

In my work, I treat every workpiece as a chance to grow and add to my toolbox.

I have learnt that it is important to be honest about what you don’t know, brave enough to experiment, disciplined about testing assumptions early and capturing what you learn. Over time, this compounds into a mechanism that lets us turn insights into action.  

9) What is a myth you wish to debunk about young public servants?

A myth I would love to debunk is that young public servants are reckless idealists who want change without understanding constraints. 

In reality, many of us are disciplined and invested in making systems work better over time and are willing to do the work it takes to achieve this. 

We respect complexity, but we refuse to be paralysed by it. We are not chasing novelty, we are chasing adoption and building solutions that can scale. 

10) Write a letter to your future self in 2035. Please keep it within 200 words.

Dear future me, 

I hope you remember why you started.  

I hope you have kept your nerve.  

The nerve to stay curious and slow things down. The nerve to stand close to people, even as the problems grow abstract and the stakes grow high. The nerve to build and reshape systems that make room for people. 

Are you still part of the uncomfortable but honest conversations, asking the tough questions early, never giving up on trying to make sense of things, building what lasts and not what dazzles? 

If you are tired, I hope it’s the good kind, earned from carrying responsibility with care and doing the meaningful work. 

With hope (and a little fire), 
Prinita