Government is a product.
It’s far more than that, of course, but from the perspective of a resident trying to accomplish a task such as paying their taxes, renewing a passport, or moving from one state to another, there’s a clear outcome the user is trying to achieve.
It can be easy to forget this fact. Seen from within, governments are departments, forms, and processes. While they made sense once, these processes are often complex or outdated. One way to recognize these issues is to think like a product manager.
In the first quarterly event of FWD50 2025, we’re going to look at what it means to build and manage products. We’re bringing in experts who’ve delivered products at the national level to talk about what they did, the challenges they faced, and the results of their work.
But that’s not all we’re covering.
Over the years, we’ve welcomed many amazing people from the USDS and 18F—a pioneering digital service lab—to our stage. Late at night on Friday, February 28, 18F was summarily dismantled.
This is the same group that built civilrights.justice.gov, ada.gov, findtreatment.gov, USDA WIC toolkit, foia.gov, wrote a guide to de-risking government technology projects, and defined Federal website standards. It took .gov domain registration from 10 days to 15 minutes, created an FBI Crime Data Explorer, and more.
After years of modernizing government and working with departments to get the most from vendors, 18F’s projects were suddenly halted. The National Weather Service, a Federal Voting Assistance Program to allow Americans overseas to vote, and the widely praised IRS Direct File service were among the projects that came to a standstill.
There’s lots to learn from 18F alumni about what it takes to modernize the public sector. Three of its past directors are on our advisory board. So we’re devoting some of our April 15 event to looking at what might have been, in the hope of inspiring other jurisdictions to adopt 18F-like models to bring government platforms into the information age.
April 15 is less than a month away. So we’re making another fairly radical decision—one that makes sense in the face of widespread changes to the public service. After all, many public servants have lost their jobs, or are facing unprecedented uncertainty in their careers. Canada has called an election. Digital sovereignty is on the minds of leaders worldwide.
The April 15 event will be free to anyone with an approved account on Access, our community platform. Just save the date, and apply for an account on Access. Then join public servants from around the world to learn how to think like a product manager—and what products might have been.