Hillary Hartley is Chief Digital and Data Officer (CDDO) in the province of Ontario, Canada, and Deputy Minister of the Ontario Digital Service. As the CDDO, Hillary is responsible for leading the government's digital and data transformation efforts to deliver simpler, more easily accessible services for the people, communities, and businesses of Ontario.

Hillary joined the Ontario government in April 2017. Before moving to Canada, she spent nearly twenty years working with state, local, and the federal government in the US. While working NIC Inc. as a sales and marketing director, Hillary collaborated with many state and local governments on their digital transformation strategies.

In 2013, she was one of the Presidential Innovation Fellows during President Obama's second term. After her fellowship, she cofounded and helped build 18F, the first digital services team in the US federal government, and served as 18F's deputy executive director.

With Hillary, you get a bit of a bargain: two-for-one. She brings to the table her the insights from two governments: the federal one in the US from her 18F gig and the state (or provincial) one in Ontario, Canada. In both roles she was right there at the lead in kick-starting a whole new team and a whole new way of doing digital in that government.

Hillary is the only regional-level digital government leader featured in this book. This is not because of the lack of excellent people working at that level. On the contrary, we could compile a whole book or a few just from such folks alone. It was simply my choice and the bias of my own interest to focus on national level digital government excellence. However, I did have to make an exception for Hillary, as the book would not be complete without her in here.

This chapter focuses on her time in Ontario. Hillary has built up culturally and managerially perhaps one of the most fascinating digital government teams anywhere, and because of who she is herself. She is very humane, really breathes and radiates empathy, true to the servant leadership approach she has adopted to practice. Her story shows that excellence can come from many different styles.

—SIIM

What Brought You to Work in Digital Government, in the US and in 18F at First?

I came from outside, from fifteen years of working with governments as a consultant or strategic advisor. I worked for a company called NIC and my last stint with them was working for their corporate office. They work with some thirty states in the US, becoming a digital service team for the state on fee-for-service kind of model. So, I got to work with a bunch of different state and local governments over the years.

I was also actively part of the emerging civic tech scene as I was living in San Francisco. Code for America started right around that same time, and I got engaged with them on mentoring and supporting. When the Presidential Innovation Fellowship started in 2012,¹ I told my boss that we should put someone forward to apply. We convinced one of my colleagues to apply and he got accepted. We stayed in touch and tried to figure out any way that NIC could be helpful in some of the things that they were thinking about like platform pieces and API connectivity to state data.

Someone then said that I should apply for the second-year batch, and after a first laugh about it, I did at the eleventh hour. I got accepted and so in 2013 I was a Presidential Innovation Fellow. That was the first time that I was a bureaucrat inside government. And I loved it!

It was just really different. It was challenging, but it was refreshing. It was so exciting to be on the inside, trying to make change, instead of just giving my best advice and pushing from the outside. It changed my perspective and was a pivot for me in my life and career.

At the end of our fellowship, I was part of a group of fellows who formed 18F—the first digital services unit for the US federal government.² My fellowship program was already in the agency that became home to 18F, so the executives asked a few of us to spend a couple of years building that up—with me as the deputy executive director. The mandate from President Obama at the time was that he wanted five hundred digital folks inside the government. Between 18F and the US Digital Service, we actually did achieve that by the time he left.

What Made You Jump to Ontario Government from There?

The founding Ontario digital government team was ten to twelve folks sort of pulled together, working with the government minister to figure out where it could go and what shape it should take. A couple of them and the minister came to Washington, DC, and met with 18F. We chatted with them about our model, how it was set up, and some of our priorities. Not too long after that they put the job description for the chief digital officer (CDO) out.

I remember tweeting it and sending it around and saying this was a great job for somebody. I did not really anticipate going anywhere myself, but the folks in Ontario were working with Public Digital and Tom Loosemore was helping them shape the role.³ He reached out to me a bit later and said, “Hey, have you ever considered moving to Toronto?” There had just been the 2016 presidential election in the US, and my four-year term contract was almost up. I started talking to the folks, went up for an interview, and things went from there.

What Appealed to You about the Job in Ontario Once You Learned More?

I was definitely interested to learn more knowing that the folks at Public Digital were involved with the program and the leadership. Ontario had invested in bringing in the folks who had helped create and shape the Government Digital Service in UK. They had now been involved in laying the groundwork, doing the early work on the political side and the bureaucratic side to shape and to help folks understand what the digital service team could do.

I also liked that they were explicitly looking for a CDO—a role that I understood and had advocated for in other jurisdictions. It was not necessarily about technology, it was not trying to replace the CIO. It was going to be to be a different kind of leader and to a different kind of team. It was also a chance to start something, to really shape something even if it had lived in a kind of embryo phase for about a year. It was still a start-up. They were trying to become part of the machinery in a way that I do not think 18F really was ever able to do. That was exciting to me.

What Was the Minister Saying That They Expected for You? What Was the Mission Set for You to Do?

It was clear that there was enough room to have a vision of my own and that was exciting to me. They knew that they wanted a leader with a vision to take this sort of fledgling team and figure out what to do with it, so it could become an agent of change. Also, to put a few lighthouse projects on the hill to start showing a different way to do things.

Did You Hesitate at All in Making the Move?

I definitely hesitated. It was a big move. It was a cross-country and an international move for me and my family physically, too.

At the time, the job scared me a little bit. I remember that I had coffee with a colleague, one of our managers at 18F, and just talked about it. She said, “Sounds like it scares you a little bit. Well, then you have to do it!”

I knew what a CDO was, and I had a vision for growing the kind of team that could make a difference. However, I did not know very much about what being a deputy minister meant—which was the other institutional part of the role. I have joked several times that I do not think I wore that hat very effectively for the first six to twelve months of the job, at least. I led my team and was proud to be the leader of my team, felt lucky to be at various tables that I recognized were important in terms of conversations and relationships. But I really did not fully grasp the hierarchy and some of the Westminster pieces for the first several months.

Did You Set Any Conditions or Prerequisites for Joining In?

As I was thinking about what the team components would be, I said that we could not even begin on the mission that we were being given if I could not have a proper starting team in place.

Initially, the digital service team was mostly a combination of communications and policy, with some technological folks that were obviously very good at hacking the bureaucracy. They had partnered with the IT team that ran ontario.ca. But there was no real product capability.

What I was able to negotiate was essentially a team for ontario.ca because it was going to be the heart of the whole effort at first. I needed a team of forty to fifty people. I was very lucky to walk into a situation where the budget had landed, and I actually started that very week. This new budget gave us the positions for people and the money, and it officially created the Ontario Digital Service (ODS). We had a team running ontario.ca, and this is what we could build from; we had room to grow.

Where Was ODS Placed Institutionally?

My role and the ODS has moved around the government every June since I started!

We started as part of the Cabinet Office, and that is where we incubated for the first year. Then there was an election, which also brought a change in government. They moved the ODS into the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services. They made me the deputy minister of consumer services, which also included our service organization—Service Ontario—which has the physical service locations along with online services.

The next year they moved the ODS back into the Cabinet Office because we had a lot of big things going on and they wanted the team and the CDO role closer to the premier.

Then we were moved into the Treasury Board a year later because of alignment there with the minister, Peter Bethlenfalvy. He was becoming the chief champion for digital transformation, and he really understands the mission. Then he moved and became the minister of finance and so we moved with him. So now we are in the Ministry of Finance.

The constant has been that I have been the Deputy Minister of the Ontario Digital Service all this time. As such, I report to the head of the public service, which in Ontario is the secretary of the cabinet. And then, in addition, I also report to a minister.

What Was the State of Digital Government in Ontario, and What Prompted the Creation of ODS?

It is not that the services were lousy. Ontario had been an e-government leader. In those early days, the thought was that if you just get the service online then people will use it. But governments learned that simply having an online presence was not enough.

To me that marks the transition to “digital,” which is not just about technology but how you make things easy and simple. If people—especially the digital natives, who live on their phones or their laptops—are not using your online services because they are not usable, then what is the point?

The nascent digital team in Ontario was seeing what was happening in other jurisdictions and knew that Ontario could do that, too. The leaders knew ontario.ca could be a world-class website and that they had the talent, the resources, and the ability to do it. They had watched many services come online, but not always using modern best practices for design and application development.

Ontario is the biggest province in Canada, the most populous, and it certainly sees itself as a leader—in Canada but also proudly always wants to be an international leader. So, there was enough momentum to set up a team that could spearhead this change, really this culture change.

What Was the Concrete Objective You Set for Yourself to Achieve?

It had appealed to me that they were trying to hire a leader who would start “turning the Titanic” on a lot of different fronts like agility, funding, procurement, really bringing a user-focused perspective to everything that we do. This really got baked into my goals from the beginning.

When I say I knew what a CDO was supposed to be, it meant to me the opportunity to build a world-class team, at the time centered on making a world-class product out of ontario.ca that could evolve into the basis for lots of different changes. These were my goals.

It was not necessarily a five-year vision. Even with the new budget, we knew we had a pretty short runway to get hiring done up to the number we had been given.

What Was Your Focus in the First Hundred Days or Three Months?

As we are a Westminster government, we receive mandate letters from the premier and were essentially given our first set of lighthouse projects with the first letter.

The most immediate work was building the team up and working on ontario.ca. But we also had a few other early projects. One of them was building something called Ontario Student Assistance Program calculator, an online estimator for the amount of money you could get to go to college. This project was the first call to action as to how can we create something very, very quickly and was simple to get the necessary job done. Our team helped the program team pivot from an online application that was several pages with many questions to a simple JavaScript-based tool that was four questions long. It was a game changer because suddenly there was a very easy thing for the minister and the government to demonstrate the change in approach. Users also had a great experience: 90 percent of completion rate as opposed to almost no one bothering to check before.

This project was something that the team continued to come back to for a long time, because it was one of the first times that we got to work with a ministry partner in a way that fundamentally changed how they approached their problem. They now saw the value of starting small, they saw the value of the service design process, they saw the value of sitting with users as they click through something and watching them and seeing where they failed.

In those first hundred days, we put together and published a list of ten key priorities for our work. It was really ten different missions to deliver.

What Were Your Initial Tools and Levers in the Mandate to Ensure Delivery Across the Government?

The ten missions were carved out as the core mandate of the ODS and the CDO and there were some levers already planned among the ten.

For example, we were specifically tasked to work with three departments on some high-priority projects, then move on to high-impact transactions. The mandate letter approach was effective in our early days because it was a call to action for other ministries to partner with us.

One of our key priorities was to help Ontario deliver a consistent high-quality user experience. In addition to partnering on delivery, the ODS established a digital service standard and introduced an assessment process to bring these principles and patterns into practice across ministries. We also developed performance benchmarks to begin to understand our digital maturity across the enterprise.

A lot of our mandate was about helping the public service be better. For example, at fostering digital talent or doing procurement in new ways or embedding service design into policy and program development. On the people side, I was tasked to give strategic advice in recruiting key positions at a senior level.

In addition to defining our priorities and focus, a key lever from the beginning was the fact that we had a champion from the top. Our minister was the deputy premier. We were in a Cabinet Office at first, and the secretary of the cabinet published the initial ten priorities for us. This made it clear that it was government priority.

Another influence lever—but also something we have had to overcome—is the “cool kids” factor. When we first started, it helped as well as hindered to be seen that way. It helped internally because we got some priority around our early projects. It also helped us recruit, because there is a growing community of tech folks who want to help the government modernize. However, of course, there are always pockets of any institution that are resistant to change, and for better or worse the ODS was the face of that transformation.

If These Were the Initial Tools at Your Disposal, Have You Added Some More or How Have They Changed?

In 2019, we worked with the government to pass some legislation—a law called the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act. It did a few things.

First, it created a statutory role called the Chief Digital and Data Officer (CDDO)—so, we added data to the title and expanded my role. It essentially established my role as setting standards and expectations. It put in place some stronger hammers to be able to compel certain things like reports or data.

Second, we elevated the digital service and data standards. The data standard is about principles concerning open data, mostly. We did not put the actual digital service standard into the legislation, but the high-level principles are there. It made the CDDO responsible and able to set those standards.

It was an important milestone because it meant that we could finally get off and running with the digital service standard and the assessment process. Assessments had been in place for a while, but now we could take the principles and write directives to compel agencies to comply with them.

How Did the Law Come About Politically? What Set Things Rolling in This Direction?

We had a government and a premier's office that understood where we were headed. The phrase that has taken hold here is “digital first”—and the goal to become a world-leading digital jurisdiction. The political champions understood it is not just about technology, but about the way we work, the way we think, the way that we approach our problems. They understood that to get results across the public service, we have to both enable and compel.

I do not remember exactly what sort of meeting or moment it was when we turned that corner and said, “Let us put this into legislation.” It was a way for government to show that they were prioritizing our digital transformation, similar to privacy or other topics. There was a statutory role for the chief privacy officer. Now there was going to be a statutory role responsible for helping the province deliver great online services.

I think I was lucky in that this step came about pretty naturally. Our team just never failed to deliver. Whatever questions the political level had, whatever we set out to do, whenever we were asked to report back—we delivered. So, there has not been a hesitation about anything that our team has pitched. Which is crazy! We are seen as a team that gives our best advice, and we will fiercely advocate for the direction we believe we need to go.

It has also been my style (and possibly a bit of naivete) to be very honest with our political partners and give my best advice. I have tried to put myself in their shoes, think in terms of their accountability, and be brutally honest to hopefully be a voice they can trust.

Besides Having Champions to Have Your Back Politically, How Did You Ensure Buy-in from Other Departments—for the Wider Role and Power?

We started the Deputy Ministers' Committee on Technology and Transformation very close to our beginning. We had been building relations and champions one-by-one and delivering great products—kind of turning the lights on. But it is slow this way, and it does not always trickle up the chain to the deputy minister level. The committee has been a way to surface some of those conversations, to surface projects and to shine a light on teams across the public service. I think it has helped folks understand what we were thinking about, and what we mean by digital. We have had a conversation many times on understanding what it means to be digital. Kind of keep going back to that, and we have been able to reiterate our North Star this way over and over again. I feel this is my main job: to constantly be reminding all the various actors and my peers on what our North Star really is and has to be.

Being able to shine light on ministry teams has helped a bit with that “cool kids” factor—showing that ODS has really become an enabler as opposed to just doing cool projects.

I also have one-on-ones with lots of my peers each month. I try to stay in very close contact. Some of them are close collaborators, just other pieces of the same bigger machine. So, I have constant touch points with our delivery partners or the comptroller general about risk, for example.

How Did You Build a Team That Excels in Delivery?

At the end of the day, I think it has been possible because of setting a tone from the top that ODS is not a top-down organization. It is a bottom-up organization. We are in government and, of course, there is hierarchy and bureaucracy. We do have executives and managers, but our teams feel empowered to understand the goal in front of them and run at it as fast and as hard as they can, without having to constantly check up the ladder. I think that is the difference, and it is a tone set from the top. My executive team fully believes in that, buys into it, does not micromanage.

I have spoken a lot about servant leadership, and I believe in it. My job is to sit at the bottom of the virtual hierarchy, not at the top. I can support, and I can get things out of the way. I can also make tough decisions when other folks need me to, but I try to leave it to them mostly. This concept of servant leadership and the concept of pushing decisions down as far as possible in our organization. Those two things really lead to a team culture in which they are constantly trying to do their best work and know that we have got their back.

We do have a code of conduct for ODS. It has been created by our team for our team. The code talks about some of those practices, and some of those things that we feel help us be a high-functioning team.

What Are Some of the Things You Have Been Telling Your Team as Your Mottos, Your Philosophy?

I sent an email to the team a few years ago about servant leadership and about what it meant to me. Folks kind of started quoting pieces of it back to me from time to time, and it has become a part of our onboarding now. As new team members get on boarded to the team, they get a handbook, and this email is part of what everybody who joins ODS reads now.

So, all or most of the two-hundred-person team know that I am not a micromanager. That I am there to ask tough questions about strategy, help them clarify a path forward, or get stuff out of the way for them. I do not want decisions showing up on my desk unless they are truly executive-level decisions.

We do not have “The strategy is delivery” painted on our walls, but that certainly has been a guiding mantra we stole from Mike Bracken. It has been a nice guiding light for teams like ours to just get started, to deliver and let that guide us.

“Focus on the user.” I think my peers would say, “Oh, there she goes again!” when they hear it. I keep saying it over and over again. Designing for users, designing with users, have you talked to a user? It is worth repeating, so that eventually everyone is asking the same questions, and it would become the way everyone works.

“Working out loud” and “working in the open” are big things for us as a team. When you work in the open, sharing the lessons you learn along the way, you not only document good team practices but you also help future teams avoid the same experience. “Make new mistakes”—do not repeat someone else's mistake. We use chat tools like a lot of other digital teams do. We have to constantly remind ourselves to get out of our direct messages and private channels, onto open channels. This way someone can see something and weigh in or add to the conversation, or search for it later and reuse it.

“Use data.” Sounds straightforward, but as leaders and teams we have to rely on evidence and data for our decision-making.

Another one that I love is the idea of “embracing the chaos.” This has been central to our success and survival at ODS, having been moved every year or working from home these last 18 months. Even before COVID-19, it was an idea to recognize that everybody has a different style of work, everybody thinks differently. How do we come together as a team to embrace all these different pieces of the puzzle and work together to get things done? Throughout last year I have tried to be very open about the chaos in my own life with COVID-19 around us and kids jumping into meetings, so that everybody else feels comfortable showing the chaos in theirs.

What Have Been Your Regular Routines or Practices with Your Team?

We try to behave like a product team, from actual staff members in product teams all the way up to the executive team. Our management team does daily standup via chat, which helps us make connections across the files. Additionally, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we did an executive standup at the end of every day for fifteen to thirty minutes to review what happened that day and to connect. In the chaos those early months brought to our work, it was a way to create transparency and connection. We have dialed it back to meeting two or three times per week, but it is still an important touch point for our senior executives.

At the full team level, we meet each week and have an all-hands every Monday. It probably averages about half of the team each time, depending on who can attend. This is our team touch point and an opportunity to check in to show new faces to people, to make announcements, and to do show and tell. Each quarter one of these turns into a kind of “Ask me anything” meeting with the executive team. It is a great opportunity to hear from the team and communicate where things are at right now.

How Have You Managed to Attract Folks to Join the Team?

Often state capitals, especially in the US, are not the most exciting cities in the state. We are in Toronto, and this definitely is a plus for recruiting because there are lots of companies here and in nearby universities. There is a natural talent pipeline here. We tend to recruit folks from consulting firms, tech companies, and other civic tech organizations.

We also make generous use of co-op placements. For example, there is the Kitchener-Waterloo corridor area an hour and half drive from Toronto. It is like a mini Silicon Valley, with innovation hubs and start-ups coming from the universities there. We have some office space at a local innovation space there for talent to reach us better this way.

Who Have Been Your Most Valuable Hires?

Choosing the right organizational model made a big impact, as said.

We built the teams not based on their daily work but on their skill sets as chapters, taking example from the likes of Spotify. That is why in the first years, as we were growing, the hiring of the chapter managers was crucial. They have been the heart and soul of the organization responsible for supporting our people through periods of growth and stress. Without people we would get nothing done. We found five incredible managers, and they have enabled us to know how to build the right teams with the right tools using the right practices.

If You Look Back to the Journey So Far, What Have Been Your Biggest Achievements That You Are Most Proud Of?

One certainly was the 2019 legislative act. It was a watershed moment because it showed that the Ontario government understood our North Star and that they wanted to make it a reality by putting the expectations, standards, and indeed statutory responsibility in place. It was a huge moment for the team, and especially for the folks, this little team, who were there before me and started down the path with the digital service standard.

Second, thanks to the championship of my minister who really wanted to learn some lessons from the pandemic, we created a cabinet committee. It is a committee of cabinet ministers called the Future State Modernization Committee. It has been meeting over the past year to help us identify priorities, set expectations, and get some funding in place. We managed to help the government set up a fund similar to New South Wales in Australia or other jurisdictions—a modernization fund called Ontario Onward Acceleration Fund. It has CA $500 million for three years to push forward on big modernization initiatives. With that fund we have managed to start an attempt for more agile funding. It will have funding for small projects that can get off the ground quickly, then the next round for growing them, then the next round for scaling.

Another achievement is sort of on the machinery side. It has been the most satisfying thing, honestly, to see the magic of our team and the ODS foundations we have put in place for the last few years to really come to life when COVID-19 hit. Having a team that is product focused and is organized as a matrix, as opposed to a business or single product only, has helped us to be able to pull teams together quickly to meet ongoing priorities. We have a foundation that enables us to be flexible. We also have the team culture in place where the second we change priority, the team knows they are empowered to get at it.

That is really what has driven our success over the last eighteen months. We were able to pretty much overnight get the team working very quickly and efficiently on COVID-19 priorities. Our matrix model and chapter setup enabled quick pivots and the necessary support from people managers.

One of our first COVID-related products showed the value of working in the open and with open source. In Canada, the province of Alberta put out the first COVID-19 self-assessment tool. Someone from our team saw it, we approached them for the code, got it, and built from it our own solution in three days. That tool has now evolved into a mini-platform with life of its own, because it has been many times iterated with changing guidelines and has become the basis for several other health self-assessment tools, like for going to school or entering businesses or workplaces. That shows the promise of our work: we build this small thing in three days, and it turns into several tools that people can rely on and use millions of times a week.

Is There Something You Have Failed at or Regret Not Having Achieved Yet?

Improving procurement was there in the initial ten key priorities but we always knew it was too big. In 18F in the US government, we were able to do quite a bit of hacking around innovative procurement. I thought we would have done more of this in Ontario by this point than we have managed to do.

The task to build stronger partnerships with digital suppliers was part of our initial mandate and priorities. It involved testing flexible approaches for procurement. We created a new procurement vehicle, using what is called the vendor of record mechanism in Ontario. For various types of work, there exist lists of vendors of record that ministries can use for easy access to certain types of services. It is like a preselected pool of vendors. We created a new pool of service design, user experience, and user research. We worked hard to streamline the application process for bidders, with five-page bids as opposed to hundreds of pages of request-for-proposal requirements. We ended up getting about thirty to forty businesses in, available to help ministries meet the digital service standard and digital-first assessment process. But the adoption of this particular pool has not been as high as we assumed.

In a way, it has been a classic case of “if you build it, they will come” type of fail—the program agencies did not come. We are still figuring out how to create those pathways. We have been able to move a few programs forward with it, but how to incentivize ministries to bake it into their process? We have to somehow get the necessities of user research and service design baked into the inception phase, at the idea phase.

This is where probably our digital maturity work has to come in. Change will come only when program leaders and program owners are thinking this way. We have just recently completed a digital maturity survey across the public service and are working with ministries on their individual digital strategies about building out all-around capacity.

And then there is the issue of funding. Governments are not necessarily agile with how they plan budgets or forecast funds. I have said it a few times that if I could wave a magic wand and suddenly make the entire public service think and work like we do in on digital teams, in an agile way and with a product focus, I think we would still fail—because government funding does not know what to do with those projects. Funding is the next hairy thing to try and solve. Ontario Onward Acceleration Fund is a baby step forward in this.

What Would Make You Move on from the CDDO Role at Some Point?

If I get to a point where I feel like I am the blocker for the team on their way to get things done quickly or not getting the support we need from political level—say, I do not click there or am pushing the wrong buttons. If I am not having value.

What Have You Done to Make Sure the Change You Initiated Is Sustained?

The way we built the team, both the model and the people, have made it possible. I have excellent buy-in, same style of leadership from the executive team. We have champions, we now have good buy-in from rest of government. This gives me great comfort to understand that whatever happens, the team will keep going and thriving.

Is There Anything You Wish You Had Known at the Start?

I did not know much about being a deputy minister. I perceived the opportunity to come in and lead this team, to do our thing. To be the kind of leader that I wanted to be. I did not understand how my role fit into the bigger picture, the “lay of the land” on a political level. I did not use the hat effectively to push earlier to get some more leverage and hammers for the team. We could have likely used the “machine” to our advantage to change certain practices and standards sooner.

It has definitely also been four years of learning how to be a different kind of executive in an institution where titles convey power and importance. I will take accountability; I will be the person that can get blamed. But I want to encourage other folks to make the day-to-day decisions and figure out how to make things work, because they have more knowledge than I do and are closer to the work.

What Kind of Skills Are Necessary to Do Your Job Well?

I think there is some natural competency that can be learned, about realizing what good service delivery looks like and then being able to advocate for it. Then to figure out what are the levers for it, what components will help to get us there.

If I were to move along from CDDO role and another person come in, I would be most nervous about whether that person has a good sense of what “good” looks like, is that person able to push back on peers and push teams in the right direction. It is a subjective understanding that comes from experience of delivering—which is why no matter the role, we hire product-minded folks.

From my bias, I would also say that it is necessary to know how product teams work. You would have to have been on product teams or a product manager or owner in the ecosystem somehow. You need to have experience with what it means to work with users, to ask the right questions, to bring something to life and see it through end-to-end.

What Are Your Key Recommendations about How to Be Excellent in the CDDO Job?

The first thing is to figure out what levers you have. If you discover that you do not have any, go to work on figuring out how to get them. I think that the list David Eaves from Harvard Kennedy School and Public Digital have put together about levers for digital service groups really nails it.⁴

It depends also on what your goal is. Do you want to be a client-centered product factory? Or do you want to be an organization that is working itself into the machine the way I have described? That will determine what type of a team you need to build. ODS started as a product factory, and hopefully we are moving toward becoming a team factory—building the digital maturity of our partner programs and ministries.

Second, figure out how you prioritize people above everything else at the end of the day, with your own style and whatever it means to you. For me, it manifests in user-centered design, in servant leadership and team empowerment.

The reason why digital government teams feel so magical to me is that they are a confluence of folks that are super smart and capable, but also super empathetic. Focused on what good looks like, on people, and on doing the right thing. Not everybody will have the same leadership style, but you have to recognize that in the digital government world, we have to stay focused on people.