YouSaid · the spoken record

Mina Hsiang

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-12-12
most recent: 2023-12-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Renewal thing on Medicaid. This is like healthcare so that people can go see doctors. And in the last three months, we have made it possible for over 3 million people to have auto-renewed Medicaid that they would have fallen off of otherwise, right? We have helped prevent over 500,000 people from accidentally getting removed due to like a different bug. So like the problem and the impact should be like deeply motivating. And then we It's just an incredible group of people to work with. And so, people who are excited about sort of increasing trust in government, who are excited to solve these problems in a long-term way.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So USDS is hiring. And in addition, lots of my colleagues across government are hiring. So I want to put in a plug for the presidential innovation fellows, the US Digital Corps, but also every single agency that I work with is currently hiring for excellent technologists who want to work on important problems across all of those boards, but in particular at USDS, you know, we're looking for product managers, designers, engineers, data scientists who have experience in production, in real life environments and complicated environments. We're excited to take on hard problems that have a technical component, but also like a non-technical, like a people organizational component who have exceptional EQ so that they can work closely with all of our federal partners and who just like really want to work on the most important and hardest problems. For massive impact. So I was just talking about that.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I've really enjoyed this conversation because it is both. The problem seems very challenging. And then it is also just such a different perspective on how to think about technology problems and user experiences than, I don't know, trying to sell ads to people. What kind of people are you looking for? You said you're recruiting. You said there's a big influx. What kind of people are you looking for as you think about, okay, we have all these problems to solve?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just not bug you, just the way your health insurance doesn't ask you every month if you're still working at that company because there's an automated way for them to evaluate that, right? It's just like having the normal transactions and services that you rely on work in the background instead of Bothering you On paper for you to like go into an office or submit something. So I think, yes, that is a piece of it, but like there's so much more operations that the government is engaging.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think for just like finding out things, there's a real, I think what you're saying makes sense. But I think there's also, you know, there's a lot of things to be done even now. So another program that we've been working on is sort of automated renewals for Medicaid. So right now in the like, we're just some other opportunities, right? So in the Medicaid program, states have to, so it's a state administer program. States have to, you have to determine every month if the person is still eligible for Medicaid by law as part of the ACA. States have to first look at like the data that they have available from like digital sources and other places to determine if they already have enough information to know if you're eligible. So like there are services where we can verify your income and it can tell some of our work has just been to like improve how that automated check works. So you don't have to be recent like instead of a state sending you an envelope that requires you to resubmit a paste of every month like how can we just”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the truth is a little bit more complicated of what people need and how they engage with government. So I think it's like a very cool and exciting vision. And I agree with you that that is where search and a lot of things are going. And I think that we can like continue making progress on that. But, you know. A lot of people need to transact with the government, which is a pretty different engagement model than just finding out things. And a lot of people are already, like most people are already in a cadence of transaction with the government and what they really want is to continue to transact with the government, but to do as little paperwork as possible for that to continue to be valid, right? And so.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just because that's where search is going, right? Like, that's where Google literally the day before we were talking, Google had announced Gemini, which is going to be the future of Google search. I don't know if it's any good, but they say it's going to be the future of Google search. And you can see how that maps directly to you ask it a question and tells you the answer. That is basically all people want from the government. Like, I ask a question and tells me what services I have access to. I'm just curious, is that a thing that has to come from the top down? Is that we need to, President Kennedy needs to announce in the State of the Union that we're going to have AI government in the next 15 years? Or is it, okay, we've got a bunch of product manager type folks at a bunch of agencies and we can babysip them towards that outcome?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think you're talking about So, a different piece of the digital experience guidance is around search and even just improving sort of information architecture on current tools and then improving sort of our ability to ensure that search results and not just like. Central Google search Each agency has its own Google Box. What you're talking about is sort of like the continued natural evolution of that to a certain extent and absolutely at the point that those tools are ready for that. I think it's a Exciting vision, and I agree with you”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I asked that question in the context of AI because you could see how the AI interface just solves that problem, especially for the government, right? Where you're saying, actually, your main interface should be a chatbot or your main interface should be just asking Siri. And we will begin the process of walking you through what other app services agencies you need to talk to. And it's almost like an ombudsman role to use that term. I don't know if that's exactly right, but it's almost just a guide to the government that sits next to you. Am I just making that up? Or is that, do you see that as an opportunity to sort of just simplify people's relationship to the government? Because the idea that the government has an interface, I think it's pretty radical. And the idea that the interface would actually be openly helpful is even more radical than that.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't have the same motivation to prune. I do think simplifying and like making sure that we're not dropping critical functionality while we're rolling things together is very important, right? So ensuring like if we build something that is no wrong door strategy or a simplified front door for multiple programs, we do have to make sure that if there are people who would enter the program through a different channel, there are people who go to get SBA disaster loans from federal emergencies and also from state emergencies. And so making sure that we keep available access points for people who come from different scenarios is definitely critically important.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we're always going to have an extremely long tail of use cases. We don't have the problem in that, I don't think that we absolutely need to get rid of all of the long tail, right? Like, I think that there are some product mindset where you just decide that you're going to fire a certain percentage of your customers because maintenance for all of those features is too much of a pain. And we can't and don't want to do that. And so we will maintain those features and they may not be as perfectly updated as they should be, but we don't have the same drive also to like manage. Expenses to get rid of those programs, right? Like those programs are critical programs that have people that they serve and budgets that are allocated to them. So I guess”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's one person who's like, I know there's a form on this website. I know how to go find it. If that moves, like it's all over. I'm mad at my elected official, right? Like, that's a weird outcome. And so now you can't reorganize the website. Like changing a website taxonomy, as I well know, is like a very complicated idea. That's what I mean by power users. There are people who have expectations of how it will work. And they rely on those expectations and they're not going to be motivated to figure out a new way. And then you have people who maybe can bring on more people or younger people or different people or attract a broader audience to the services if you make it simpler. And those things seem, that's what I mean by a Microsoft Office problem. Like I know the office PM would love to get rid of most of those icons, but they can't.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that we have quite that problem. There's definitely like a long tail of programs that serve less, a smaller number of people. And we definitely have to continue like these programs are critically important to people. That question made me laugh, I don't know who's the power user of the social security website because there's a finding who's like, I know.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This brings to mind just a split. Like, you have the ultimate Microsoft Office problem, right? You have a core set of users who need to do one thing, and then I'm certain you have people who expect the features to always be there across all these products no matter what. And you can never unship a feature. Do you think about how to balance between the power user of the social security website and the person just showing up on the first day and is a little confused and needs help?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Programs to sort of figure out how this influence, how we communicate with the public, et cetera. Absolutely think that that You say, like the future of lots of companies and the future of technology and government, but we're going to have a really high bar. When and how that gets used. And frankly, that's one of the reasons that the recruiting question about this is so important, right? In order to do a great job of utilizing those tools, but also evaluating how we're doing on all of that, it requires us to have the people inside government who have that expertise, who know how to implement systems, who know how to tune them and test them and build them out.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I do love this question. Going back to your last question, right? Like, we do hold ourselves to a higher standard. Like, we're not just going to try random stuff and, as you say, like give people incorrect information about other social security benefits. So is it on the roadmap to understand how to incorporate AI to more effectively deliver all these services? Absolutely. But do we need to get to a place where we have a degree of reliability, consistency? frankly, equity in all of these tools and our ability to sort of control what they do and understand and make sure that they are going to operate exactly correctly? Yes. And so if you go to AI.gov, yes, there's a recruiting thing, but there's also an inventory of use cases which lays out all of, well, the majority of the ways that agencies are currently exploring using AI already using AI, and that's growing. But a lot of it is”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really focused on the idea that the government should have an interface and that you can get a lot of value from the government if you could only figure out how to use it. And that's a lot of what your agency is trying to do, right? You're trying to unlock it so people can use the government. And right now that is expressed through websites and apps. And I think that has a long roadmap to go. But you mentioned President Obama was on the show. We're talking about AI. There's a lot of government interest in AI, not just to regulate it and bring it under control and make sure it doesn't kill us all, but also because if you could just talk to the government and it could provide you services, that would be much better than having to navigate some library of apps. Is that on your mind? Is that on your roadmap that we should have some sort of LLM powered interface to the government? Because that seems like the next turn for a lot of things. Maybe not LLM. So just some sort of AI system.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It back to a question you asked earlier and a point you made earlier like lawmakers at the end of the day, they're number one metric that they're deciding on things on is not monthly actives, right? Is a good piece of a pitch and it helps us tell a story. But at the end of the day, they care about what they're hearing from their constituents. So I guess that's my actual answer is that like I think in a good way, mostly we're all sort of focused on like, okay, what is the actual experience rather than like what proxy metrics have we cooked up so that we can have a quick like pitch deck and look at 42 companies a week? So I guess my answer would be like we try to be much more holistic about it and look at sort of the overall picture of what's actually happening and whether our metrics are reflective of that is one of the big questions that we're, you know, what are the most appropriate metrics for us to be worried about?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To boost the monthly actives number so that when you go to Congress, you can say, Look at the monthly actives What a tech company CO would do, right? They would boost their monthly actives so they can tell their investors the next earning call that the monthly actives went out.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you mentioned that monthly actives for the VA app, my mind immediately jumps to how tech companies would boost their monthly actives. Like, have you ever thought about just sending it super thirsty notification? Like, there's a new post. Is that a game you would play?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we are actually living that walk, walking the walk that they want, rather than sort of doing a whole bunch of other things. So I think there is more complexity. And this is where some of the really interesting and hard problems come in, right? How do you deliver an exceptional user experience, but do it in a way that meets like your moral standards and sort of the privacy and equity expectations that the public has. I think it's a great question.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ourselves to a much higher standards. Like all of the shady sharing your data between apps and applications and websites and like Don't do that, and we hold our vendors to higher standards when they're delivering services for our products, the federal government's products, which says that like any data that comes through this, you can't use it for other purposes either, right? And that Leads to a different experience sometimes than what people have come to expect, but it is the right, it is what people vote for and in their hearts know that they want”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Uniformity, consistency of navigation and language, and like overall sort of branding that allows us to be extremely clear about like what is Government website, what are the things that you should trust? Why? To be very clear, and still accessible, right? Like it also shouldn't be the case, to your point, that like it has to have complicated legalese for you to believe that it's the government. We should build other ways for you to say, like, this is a trusted service and it is still simple for you to use. And so to build brand guidelines and usage guidelines that make it more clear when you are on a trusted website of the United States government and when you are doing sort of key transactions. So there's a web design system that we are standardizing on for the whole government. There are branding materials and sort of a navigational framework and other things that we're working on to make it more clear that this is a government thing that you should trust. I will also say like the other half of what you're saying is that there are challenges in product development because we have to hold our”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That isn't a very astute question And it's a complicated question to answer. We have ruled out quite recently the Office of the Federal CIO, by the way, she used to be the Claire Martorana, the current federal CIO, also used to be a USDSer, which is part of our plan to longer term change government is how people stay in key roles. So the federal CIO's office recently rolled out digital experience guidance. And part of the goal of that is to build in a degree of”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this is a huge generalization. I'm sure I'm going to email us about it, but I'm just going to do it for the sake of the argument. In general, the audiences that have come up in the paradigm are used to navigating it, and the audiences that have not are struggling with it. And obviously people are different on different parts of the scale. I think Gen Z is actually pretty bad at technology, just like they're bad at file systems. They haven't grown up with them. So there's my out. Don't send me the emails. But that seems like a real problem, right? The paradigm of ultra-capitalistic user interfaces on the internet and then the government are in conflict. How do you manage that conflict?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Let me ask that question a different way. I appreciate the pushback there. I don't disagree with it. But I think for a lot of folks, the online environments they find themselves in are actively hostile or actively trying to scan them or actively pushing them towards advertising or transaction of some kind. You just see it all over the place. And then you have to say, well, I need you to trust that often the same sort of format on your phone in an app, the same kind of design language. Where maybe you have it already a distrust of what might happen there. That seems like a real problem, right? If people open their email and it's full of spam and then you're like, click this other button and this will get you your health benefits. You're operating in that paradigm, whether you want to or not. And I think in general.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tools for shopping for Medicare plans, new tools for sort of looking at and comparing part D plans, very high engagement rates. So I think it's just about making the tools simple and appropriate.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they also find it inconvenient often to go do that, right? Like you have to find transportation for people who are still working, you have to take time off work. I think there's a tremendous opportunity to meet those people where they are. And I think a significant proportion of them are willing to be met digitally, but we need to raise the bar on what our digital experience is, how simple it is, so that they can engage in that way. to the last point that you were saying, we have to slowly like i don't think you can change people's culture and expectations overnight, but we have to have a slow success rate, a slow rollout of a relentless set of like successful programs and successful applications so that people aren't deterred just by the idea of it. So I think the opportunity to engage with older populations digitally is still extremely salient. And we see that, right? Medicare has been rolling out new”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I would say I think that's an expectations problem because they have had bad experiences in the past. And it is the case that maybe someone who is like younger and more digitally native would be able to figure out a bad experience. But the truth is that we need to raise the bar on the actual experiences such that all these demographics can engage online. I have seen enough. I ran a Medicare business. We were texting constantly with our members. They are excited to be engaged in technical ways that are frankly less expensive than walking into like a social security office. Obviously some people really need to go to a social security office and we should have those options available for those people.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was going to say I was entertained when you said that because I said the kids actually aren't on Facebook anymore. And it's only the older demographics that are on Facebook. And a lot of them are Facebook. For you, money, and they're not advertising. So it's a problem for their business model. But what it proves is that that generation is totally willing to be digitally engaged, right? And so if your parents say, I don't want to deal with the government in that way”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you are mixing together a few different factors. And so maybe to tease those apart. I spent a lot of time building tools for elderly people to use. And frankly, they are psych. They're on Facebook.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discrepancy in your user base in a way that I think Facebook is like whatever we want the old people to go away. We're focused relentlessly on younger people forever. They have the luxury of being able to do that. And then you have a bunch of politicians that write your budget. Who in this country are almost exclusively old people? How do you manage that? Like if the interface for getting good government services becomes more and more like phones or apps, we're going to leave a lot of people behind. And then most importantly, the people who write the checks for it are also going to be angry at it.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with USTS administrator, Mina Shung, to talk about her design philosophy and where the approach of big tech differs from the USDS. Thing that I think about a lot is we've talked about product managers and user research and all this stuff. If you go to a young person, you're like the fastest way to get what you want is open this app and the app is good and it will be effective and you can just like push some buttons. Most young people are very digitally native now. They're like, great. I don't want to talk to a person. I don't even want to make a phone call. I will just figure out the metaphors embedded in this user interface and I will get what I want done. And the kids know how to use Snapchat. That's like the greatest example of like I will navigate this bizarre user experience to get what I want. And that thing is a success. I go to my parents or older folks and say, you need to figure out this computer to get what you want from the government. That is just crashing into a brick wall of antipathy because they've had bad experiences with that stuff or they think it won't work or they think it will be too hard. That is a huge”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People processing things that are where we have a backlog, right? And I think those are political issues. You have a backlog of claims. That's a problem. And one of the ways that you accelerate that is by making all of those claims processors more effective and helping them be more efficient about processing those claims. So I think there's multiple pieces where technology is helpful and we are one of the most effective instruments of making technology more effective in government, both in a user-facing way and a backend way.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look at how good it is. It's frankly like continuing to invest in your technology has a bunch of benefits, right? And doing it intelligently. So one, like we help agencies more effectively manage how they spend on technology. The honest, like as you know, in my preference after life, I had lots of contracts too. It takes like a high degree of expertise to effectively manage contracts to get what you want. And so we help agencies figure out how to most effectively spend their money and use their money. And a tech roadmap that is thoughtful is obviously much more cost effective than one that has a little bit less expertise in it. So I think there's like a cost effectiveness piece. There's also a broader cost effectiveness opportunity, which is part of technology is to make us all more productive. And one of the huge drivers of cost that a lot of agencies is like a very large number of calls to the call center, for example.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mike Lee. No. I was trying to think of a funny thing to say about that, but I don't even like, I guess the thing I could do that with is like the number of inbound requests we get, which does have some of that feature.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We definitely do. Yeah, I mean, ultimately our budget comes from Congress. And just like any startup CEO, part of my job is to go explain what our ROI is and show.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think USS has to a certain extent more flexibility. We have a lot of demand, and I think we're highly leveraged when we go into an agency. We help them become more efficient and more effective The end of the day, I think USDS can scale up and down and just take on more and less programs depending on the priorities across the board. Do you see your job as?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mean for USDS, or you mean for an agency that is trying to deliver services in a consistent fashion despite fluctuating budgets?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's also just like the general politics of it, right? Obama administration created this agency. Trump cut the budget, Biden raised the budget, the congressional Republicans, if they accomplished anything, they will cut the budget. There's an election coming. Who knows what will happen? How do you manage through that? Do you assume that there'll be some fixed number you can work with and then you'll have an increase or decrease or are you just waiting to see what happens?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there. And I think the executives who are moving into leadership positions in agencies are beginning to have more experience in managing ongoing investment in operations in IT. But the way government budgeting works, it is challenging, and this is one of the key things that we are constantly working on, that we're working with our colleagues at the Office of Management and Budget about, right? Like how do we structure this budget to make sure that we can have the right degree of investment over time? So it's a real challenge.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is never done, which is basically stop thinking that you build it and then you put it on an operations and maintenance contract and you never have to modify it. And that's a real good way to waste a lot of money over time. And so the conversation”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's one of the tremendous challenges. You're hitting on the head a couple like of the fundamental issues that we try and work with agencies, but stakeholders across the board to sort through. But some of them are some of the immovable objects. So one, you know, you asked, what do product managers do? Like the desire for new quick hits and to do something new in government rather than fixing what's old is huge. product driven company would tell you like if you just keep launching new things that's not the right way to satisfy your users in a lot of different ways right figuring out how you're going to knit those together it gets confusing you get proliferation and as you said like it means you're not paying enough attention to your legacy products you know i think we're having the conversation now which is incredibly important um i helped write a paper a few years ago for the defense innovation board the title of which ended up being soft”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a real tendency to take technology for granted to believe that you can just sort of deploy it or that it will continue running or that you don't need to update it once you have it. I can see that in the government maybe most of all, particularly when I listen to our elected officials, that you can just like wave your hand at technology and make it go. Something like the VA, right? You get the VA wrong. People don't win re-election, right? There's a lot of political pressure around a process like that to make it better instantly. How do you manage the pressure that comes with people taking it for granted or demanding a quick fix against, okay, we have to do this invisible, very difficult database migration in order to get to the place that you want?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Together in concert, our goal is not like we very rarely hands on keyboard build the most of our time with like a combination. There are very real technical problems, but a lot of non-technical problems too. And it's really how do you catalyze all these partners to work together? So, you know, Work is done by the contractors, and we're here to help the agency figure out how to most effectively draw the roadmap, prioritize the work, manage the technical roadmap, and also like the product roadmap. How do you build that into the contracts and sort of all of that? So it's a very highly leveraged model in that way.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You eat the elephant one bite at a time. All through that, we are working closely with the existing tech teams that are focused on like, so some of this is like bringing the executives, the existing tech teams that are focused on those parts of the experience, the procurement folks, the contractors, and helping everybody sort of shift what their objectives are, how they work together, how we make this more closed loop so that let's adjust our methodology to say that the outcomes and some types of user ratings should factor in to how contractors are evaluated, which will change how they decide to do their user research and change how they decide to do their monitoring. Let's build a process where we start to look at the Google Analytics from utilization, and that builds into how we prioritize next things. Oh, first we have to put in Google Analytics so we can do that, right? So it's a very centralized, like how do we help catalyze all of these partners to work?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, all of your listeners are like, here's what we should never do, just like a database unification project that has no, like, those never go well, right? So you have to figure out what use cases are you going to focus on fixing first. So a lot of our initial work is like getting everyone around the table to look at the data on like what users are doing, where we're getting stuff, what are the bottlenecks, and decide what problems we want to take on first, right? It takes.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I love this question. No, we, I mean, we don't do anything that is not in deep partnership with a bunch of different partners, right? So we are 230 people at that time. I think we were like 60 or 80 people. But the VA has a huge IT department of their own and a huge operations and customer service department of their own. And most of the build work across government, almost all of the build work across government is done by contractors. There's also a procurement shop at the VA that is letting contracts to vendors to build all these capabilities, to update the databases, to do the user research and build the front end. And so we deploy small teams like you would not believe how small on some level the team can be, but like, you know, a dozen people to go and help the agency really like strategize what does our roadmap? So, you know, you said like unifying all the databases.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ratings and reviews in the App Store, which is all the way down the line, right? The first part of it, just that we're going to bring all the databases together. Did you just set a team on that and tell the VA, get out of our way, we're going to fix it? Or do they have a team? How did that work?”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is an amazing example because there's layers upon layers here, and we can just go through them. The first one is boy, there's a bunch of old computer systems and databases that need to get integrated so that you can use a website to process a claim with a hospital and talk to the DoD. Like that just seems intractable. At any company, you're like, we have five different databases. One of them is run on Cobal. Fix it, right? It's like already intractable. Are companies trying to migrate to WordPress? It's intract. It's like just even that piece of it is hard. Then there's. We need to build some front end user experiences to replace our picture of the secretary and a phone number for the main contact line into an application Transact with, and that is reliable. And then there's we're going to care about.”
2023-12-12 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · USDS head Mina Hsiang wants Big Tech’s best minds to help fix the government · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT