Tl:dr - Train your staff human centered design and product skills and emphasize communications/facilitation skills

Train on HCD and product

The foundation of the most successful efforts in creating products and services that resonate with users is Human Centered Design. Moreover, the Lean product development process and agile practices are foundational skills that consistently deliver great results. As such, our training curriculum focuses on training our staff to do the discovery phase of the typical Lean process. We focus on problem definition.

Often in this work, your staff will go into engagements where the participants are skeptical. Our staff turns this understandable doubt into excitement, but focusing on empathizing with the paint points the problems cause for staff and users. We work side by side to carefully define the problem and break it into more easily addressed challenges. We then iterate on solving a few challenges at a time until we have solved a large part of the entire problem space.

Core to working with group is our training in facilitation techniques. This ability is key to helping drive people to consensus.

Design thinking and effectively breaking larger problems into more tightly defined challenges to break out of “group think” and status quo solutions

Prototyping and Product Management (needs to be new core skill of government staff: policy + laws + goals + voice of the user = awesome product person)