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

“Looking back at where he was Nine years ago, it is like impossible to imagine that that is where we are now, but that is what agency transformation looks like. And it shows, right? So in that time, trust metrics across the VA, which is not exclusively due to their digital experience. But by the way, in the process of integrating those on the front end, you also have to build out your business processes and figure out how to make those more seamless has gone up by 20 points. And that's huge for a critical demographic.”
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
“Very transactional oriented. It's like, how can we serve you? What do you need to do? What are you trying to do? And then more recently have additionally supported the VA in building out their own mobile app, which As your demographic will understand, like building an app is the thing that executives are always like, Should we have an app? You're like, bar has to be incredibly high before you decide. But similarly, like we got a lot of user feedback. We looked at the functionality really hard. The CTO there is a former USDSer and he's incredible. And ultimately they decided it was worth the investment and critically important. And now it has over half a million monthly actives. It has over a million users. It's like 4.8 stars in the App Store. you know, I think something like 100,000 five-star reviews. So, you 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
“Was clear that we needed to have sort of a wholesale transformation of how that agency thought about integrating all these services, but you got to start somewhere, right? And so in part, those are really helpful for prioritizing both that we needed to focus on issues at the VA and then also which of those issues to take on first. And so we started that work. Initially, we launched a compendium site, a beta site that was called vets.gov. So it was different from the VA website. It only handled a couple of the things that you needed to do, but it was the place that we could direct you to do your benefit appeals. And then over time, built out the functionalities of that, eventually moved that to be the main site. Now if you go to va.gov.”
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
“Not any consumer who's like, Where is my claim? How do I make an appointment with my doctor? Which facility are they actually in when I'm going to see my doctor? Like real transactional questions that any normal consumer would have. This was at the same time as there were a variety. The VA was sort of in crisis. They were having trouble scheduling veterans. There were a lot of challenges with data coming over from the DoD and people figuring out where their benefits claims were and their benefit appeals were. And so we got a lot of inbound on those topics and it helped us really identify areas to prioritize what sort of the biggest pain points were because”
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
“Nine years. And at some combination of letters and engagement from constituents, letters that go to the hill that then come to the White House. And frankly, media, right? So I will also sometimes get a news story that is this really this big of a problem and how do we fix it? So we have been engaged at the Department of Veteran Affairs for the last nine years. At the beginning of that time, the VA website helped you understand who was the Secretary of the VA and what is the structure of the VA. Who cares?”
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's less frequent that we would get a screenshot and more frequent that we would get a letter from a constituent or a letter from a user, right? So it's more like you get tickets and the way that people submit ticket kits to leadership in this context is you write a letter to the White House or to the president. So we have engaged in significant work at the Department of Veteran Affairs over the last”
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
“A tipping point where they can move to a place where over the long term they will start taking on more of these problems in a different way. And so we're also evaluating how ready the agency is to do things differently. Sometimes there's no chance, right? Sometimes even if the agency is not quite ready to think about things differently, you have to go do the work because it's so critical. But we definitely like that is an important factor for us as well.”
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
“How do you decide what projects framework? And then there's their general framework. So there's so many problems to take on. There's so much work inbound. I am lucky in that it is not exclusively me. We have other stakeholders who engage in that. So I work very closely with the leadership of the Office of Management and Budget, which is the part of the White House in which we sit, and also with the Chief of Staff's Office at the White House, to sort of triage and evaluate the impact of opportunities. Ultimately, we're extremely focused on where can we go that will have the greatest impact as determined by what we'll have the greatest impact for the most people in the most significant need. That is a combination of is this the right type of project for USDS? Like, is this, you know, does it have a technology component? Is there a need for our skill set? It is those impact metrics. And there is also component of long-term change, right? Our impact can be greater if the agency is sort 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
“We are very careful to ensure that folks who come in who have specific interests don't get into a position that would even have the appearance of impropriety, let alone actually have any influence. I do think there's like a real tension to grapple with. As you know, the tech industry and a lot of companies now pay with equity and sort of the model of compensation in the world. Regulations, I think, need to catch up and figure out how to think about that because you want people who have expertise in seat. And so figuring out what is truly competitive and what is not, I think is, I think there's an opportunity there. But we're extremely careful about it because as you say, I think there is. Would be totally not worth it for anyone to even perceive that that was an issue. Like, this is just such important work to be undertaking.”
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
“Other agencies often get criticized for having revolving doors, right? You go work for the thing that might regulate you or might compete with you in the case of the USDS, and then you go back to work for the companies. You've had your own investments come under pretty harsh scrutiny because you had some waivers for conflicts of interest along the way. How do you manage those conflicts? Is that a concern of yours?”
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 there is one agency in the federal government, the Office of Personnel Management, and their job is to sort of help the entire government. Understand how to do hiring in the government way. They like make up the rules. And we have worked with them at the end of last year and the beginning of this year to stand up sort of a function that is called Tech2Gov that has pulled together lots of different agencies and has worked to build a common engagement model. We have job fairs where lots of agencies show up and we have speakers and people can go meet with people leaving tech companies can come and meet with agencies, learn about what they do, understand how it would work. So I think kicking off that initiative, for example, was motivated in part by just the significant availability in the market and the need and coupling those together. It just really felt like there was a moment to kickstart those types of efforts. I wouldn't say on a day-to-day basis, like I said, we have 6,000 applications of people who are like desperately want to come and work. So we do have recruiters and we keep 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
“We have definitely had more applicants this year than in any prior year. I think that's a function of several factors, frankly, some of what you led with, which is that this is becoming more of a thing and sort of it's grown every year. But I'm sure that factors into it. There's a lot of incredible people who are free agents now. And so that's an unfortunate fact, but also an opportunity for the government as well.”
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
“A lot of layoffs in tech this year, just a lot of turnover in general. They're more at Spotify this week as we're talking. Is that a new pool of applicants or talent for you to go mine? Are you seeing there's more interest in government work now?”
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 think it's incredibly important. We spend a lot of time together. And, you know, I mean, I think it's. Challenging and it's even more challenging in sort of a hybrid world. But people are deeply united by what they came here to do, right? People come here because they are deeply motivated by the mission, want to have a massive impact. USDS, we take people who have a lot of experience and part of the reason that we're doing so many interviews, right, is we get, I think we're on track to get almost 6,000 applications this year. We will hire one to two percent of those people. you know this type of being able to drop into an agency help them from a technical perspective but also have the exceptional EQ to really help bring the agency along and teach them how to do that it's a rare skill and it requires experience and so I think we have you know folks who have maturity and are deeply united by their love of hard problems their love of the mission and and their commitment to impact and so that is incredibly helpful in keeping everyone sort of working together against that North Star”
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
“Exercise, you know, hiring in government is challenging, convincing people is challenging. And so we have a big talent team that really works to both do recruiting and help us process all of that hiring and manage. I think we are on track to do almost 2,000 interviews this year. Wow. Yeah, so it's just like a significant operation to sort of get to where we need to be.”
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 are structured a lot like a consultancy also. So we have communities of practice, so verticals that are all of our engineers, all of our product managers, all of our designers, all of our procurement experts. And then we have people deployed on like project teams. And so those have their own sort of internal structure, but are sort of necessarily temporary. But some of those are three months temporary, and some of those are three years temporary. you know, that varies. And then we also have a significant operational side of the house. So everybody is on a two-year term. So everyone comes in or less. I know you spoke with President Obama about this. We bring people in and working in government can be an incredibly hard mental shift. And so over time, it has evolved and we have a lot more folks who have been here or have heard about it more directly. But we bring people in for a short period of time. Sometimes they decide to stay the entire two years.”
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
“Definitely not It's the biggest we've ever been, and I get unfulfillable requests every single week, as you would expect. There is such an incredible need for these capabilities across the government. And whether they should all sit in, as you said, like a semi-like a consultancy attached to the White House is a great question. The total number of engineers across the civilian government is like significantly smaller than at one big tech company. And the number of services and products that we are managing and developing is dramatically larger. So no, there's a lot of need and tremendous opportunity. We are hiring agencies are hiring right now. There are thousands of open positions for incredible technical talent across the federal government.”
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
“No, I don't think most agency heads think of themselves. Some of them do. And we've come a long way in helping instill that perspective. But that Go into an agency in a very senior position to work directly with the agency leadership on a specific program. So we have done a lot of work with the Social Security Administration. And some of it is bringing them along with like, what should you be asking your team to make good product choices? Like making sure that they get demos, making sure that they see videos from users of like where do users get confused because not all of us are the target demographic for the services. Then taking a further step back and saying, you know, your product is not just your website, it's your website, as you said, in your call center and your in-person service. And how do we stitch those together? Because, you know, for a variety of reasons over time, those are all managed by completely different business units with completely different technology systems. So there's a real need to sort of pull those together and have product mindset from the top down.”
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 like to talk about product CEOs in tech a lot, right? And I think a lot of exceptional products are built by CEOs who have a real product mindset, who live inside the product, who take customer calls. The way you get to very senior positions in government is quite frequently through a policy process, right? Through policy expertise, which has not a lot to do with execution in government for lots of reasons, sort of policy is like deciding what we're going to do. implementation is doing it and never the two shall spend much time together 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
“You go on USA jobs right now and look through all the federal jobs Are not enough product manager jobs? And if you look at all the people across the government who like how many product managers should we have, there are not as many as you would expect given the number of programs and products there are. So there's still a lot to be done there. Our colleague Jen Paul likes to talk a lot about how product managers are kind of a key piece of this. And that I think still there's room to grow.”
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 were joking when you said, What is a product manager? But it's a squishy concept, even in the companies where, like where I used to lead product, it was a squishy concept. I think explaining what specific roles should do and how they should fit together actually ends up being a lot of our work. And a lot of our work is not just explaining it, but showing, right? So we do the first project together. And it's like, what does a product manager do? You say it the way I sort of said it, and that's kind of the same as a project manager. It's kind of the same as a policy expert. And so we actually just live the program and live a project and all do it together for six months, a year, 18 months. And that really helps them see, oh, these are the ways that it's really materially different from what came before. And that's what gives us, you 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
“It definitely changes the agency. So I would say we've made a lot of progress and things are really different. I don't show up in an agency anymore and have them say like, what is user research? And when is, well, sometimes what is human-centered design? But like, what is user research is not a question. Like, what is the cloud? And it's completely unsecure. And I couldn't use it. Like, definitely conversations I had to have 10 years ago.”
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
“Idea that you're going to bring a product culture into an agency, right? I'm guessing 10 years ago that was a much harder road than it is now. Has that changed? I don't think you're explaining on a fundamental level what a product manager does anymore. I hope not. But the idea that you're going to bring that culture to the agency and that they're going to adopt that culture, that changes the agency itself, right?”
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 from every different contractor are coming over and being like, Oh, where did you get that? That's really helpful. That helps me debug this. That helps me debug that. And so, and you're like, no, I like went to the website and I printed it out. And so I think, you know, you asked about the product mindset, like just making sure that everyone feels like a user and like takes that mindset. I mean, that was just like so eye-opening and really helpful for the rest of time because the frequency with which like all I have to do is turn around my computer and be like, let's do this together. Is tremendous. So many amazing stories like that from that time.”
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
“Like because you can sign up on the call center and they ask me a bunch of questions and I wrote down the questions and I sent it around. I was like, this is the questions they asked. So this is the data we collect. Starting point like be a user. I think I applied for health insurance. Like don't tell anyone because you weren't supposed to do that. But like I applied for health insurance like 30 times. I just kept making up new email addresses. And over time, we built actually not over that much time. Like we had to put in instrumentation. And so we got every screenshot, right? So we had like a bunch of users go through and take screenshots so we could like figure out where monitoring was and figure out user flows. And my desk was like this folding table in the hallway. And I'm in charge of metrics and a few other things and like product management and trying to sort of put together our key metrics. And on the wall, I have pinned like all of the user flows. I have this great photo. It's like literally all these pieces of printer paper with stickies on them where we want to put in mixed panel like monitoring.”
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 were 30 something contractors. All of them were building different parts. There was somebody who was managing the infrastructure and somebody else who was managing the front end and someone else who's doing the user research. And like there wasn't a central stand up or operations control or anything in advance. And so I arrived several weeks after the site is already out. And I got brought into this situation. And I'm like, okay, so what the site is down. So I can't go through the site myself. And so I'm like, what questions are we asking people? And everyone like looks around and nobody knows what information we're collecting from users to determine if they can have health insurance. So I called the call center and I.”
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
“A part of the White House. And so the White House provides its degree of coordination and strategic direction for agencies. And so they're also one of our key stakeholders. So we're also in a position where we can tell the agency hard truths or help them redirect or sort of help them think about different approaches, different objectives in a way that I think can be hard if you're trying to sell business.”
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. Think that is a good model. With the caveat that consultancies operate under their own incentives. U.S. Digital Service does not get paid more if we create more different tasks at an agency that requires our engagement. And so I would just say, I think like a consultant model is quite accurate, but there are some core differences. So we're not incentivized about how much business we can drive there. We are helping the agency. We have extremely aligned incentives with the agency in a lot of ways in that our goal is to deliver services to the public. And we're in a position where, and consultants do this too, but it plays out in different ways. We're partly hired by the agency, but we're partly hired by the American people. We're partly hired.”
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
“Product managers Take a look at the core problem that you're trying to solve and the resources and trade-offs available and really try and facilitate everybody getting to a path forward on how we should try and best solve that problem given the constraints, the resources available, like what we consider a solution, right, whether it's financial, whether it's number of users served. So I think their job is to sort of build a path forward.”
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
“Right. And I would add that, like, some of the ways that this has shifted over time is we go into the agencies, we help them surprise their work on a specific program that is of critical importance. But now we're also, as you say, like government has realized that it wants to build this capability and that this is central to our role. And so we really work with the agencies to build out their internal capacity to do this as well, helping them understand what do product managers do, how do you hire engineers who are competitive from market, and sort of standing up the types of management structures that will make all of this effective inside those agencies. So we are like an execution arm, but also trying to be like a catalyst for change and evolution within government as well.”
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 have a technology underpinning and a technology component, which, as you know, is basically everything these days, right?”
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
“Which is incredibly important. And the teams that are at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid manage it exceptionally at this point. So the U.S. Digital Service is created as a place to bring in exceptional technologists and to work inside government to make the government work better through technology and design. How we do this is, you know, we recruit in incredible folks who have experience building the best, the most usable, the most equitable, the most efficient and scalable systems, technology products. We put those people together with people who have expertise in how to get things done in government. So we build these teams of people, interdisciplinary teams, and we deploy those to agencies who are the execution arm of the government to work on critical programs and to supercharge the teams that are already working on those programs to help them set up interdisciplinary teams to ship excellent products, to deploy them against major problems.”
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
“Talk about the digital service. It started because of a catastrophe, you were there. Obama administration tried to launch healthcare.gov. The site crashed. I think you were on the team that had to fix it. You had like a six-week sprint to fix it. Now it's here, right? We're 10 years into having a United States Digital Service. What is it? What is it meant to do?”
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 it always ebbs and flows, and it somewhat depends on society as a whole and how we are thinking about it. I mean, I certainly feel that in the 10 years that I've been in and out of the digital service, right now is definitely a lot of energy around how do we tackle these challenges and how do we take on these questions head on. So absolutely.”
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
“Really excited to talk to you. It feels like we are in a moment where the government thinking about technology is in vogue again. Maybe it hasn't been for quite some time. Maybe ever. But the idea that the government should have some capabilities and build good products and in particular have the capability to understand what's going on with AI. It seems like the nature of the government's relationship to technology and the tech industry has changed. Do you feel that as well?”
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
“View of software entirely. It's actually really refreshing and it made me think about how much more often we should consider software in a context that doesn't involve a giant corporation trying to sell you something. Okay, Mina Sheng, the administrator of the United States Digital Service. Here we go. You are the administrator of the United States Digital Service. Welcome to Decod”
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
“Mina says a popular catchphrase at USDS is that software is never done, which is meant to remind everyone that simply fixing an app or a website isn't the end of the road. Now, if you're a decoder listener, you know, this is a familiar issue at any software company. But the stakes for the government are much higher. These systems are how millions of people, including millions of older people, get their healthcare and other critical benefits. Now, I've long been fascinated by the idea that the interface to the government is just too hard, that the government's too hard to use. Most people don't know what services are even available to them, and they certainly don't know how to take advantage of those services quickly and easily. So I wanted to ask Mina about that. And if things like AI chatbots could make it easier to have a unified view of government for the average citizen, I won't give her answer away, but it was fascinating, and for me it really highlighted the gap between the profit and growth motivations of Silicon Valley tech companies and the goals of the government.”
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