Failing FWD: lessons in building digital teams and products

At the core of an agile practice is developing hypotheses and testing them in the real world. This means you will fail, hopefully early and not too often. Digital service organizations need to embrace failure in their work like they do in their product design. More broadly, the current global trend towards agile, user centered design in government services presents an unparalleled opportunity to create greater equality and transparency in public-facing services.

Reviving their popular panel from last year, this all woman panel will return to tackle commons ways that digital government organizations have failed. Each panel member will dive into one area of failure and offer advice for how digital practitioners can improve upon their approaches. The panel will be honest, thoughtful and engaging while drawing on their multi-disciplinary backgrounds to discuss the challenges of digital.

Topics of failure include: the pitfalls of being a ‘flat’ organization; challenges in designing a digital organization within traditional government, making large-scale change work in big bureaucracies, moving quickly and intentionally, and finally, operationalizing user-centred design practices at scale.