Building Better Digital Service Teams, Initiatives, and Results
There Is No Shared Mental Model for What Makes ‘Good’ Digital Service Teams, Initiatives, and Results.
Across every conversation in our Digital Services Retros project, the primary pattern was: there are no patterns.
- People came to work on digital service teams and initiatives with dramatically different expectations.
- Agencies didn’t know how to partner with digital teams.
- Digital teams didn’t know how to navigate agency bureaucracies.
- The digital government field lacks a shared vocabulary and definition of success for service delivery.
The lack of throughline connecting practitioners across organizations – in government, the private sector, and civil society – means there are not shared career pathways, methods of completing the work, or expectations for outputs.
Key (and Interrelated) Findings
- There is no unifying theory of change for how digital services contribute to societal outcomes, government-wide strategy for leveraging digitalization to achieve those outcomes, or logic model for how diverse types of teams across government work together.
- The digital government field has struggled to scale. It needs formalized hiring pathways, common resources, and industry standards to build a pipeline of talent.
- We built digital teams, not services. Without a clear sense of the problem, team models for types of work, or methods for working across agencies on end-to-end services, building a team became the outcome and measure of success.
Articulate a theory-of-change – at the societal, government-wide, functional, and agency levels – that allows diverse contributors to work in concert to deliver a commonly-identified set of societal/user outcomes.
Shared success metrics and standards allow for different digital government institutions to take on ambitious challenges based on comparative advantage, rather than compete for resources.
The field has gerryrigged its way to survival for over a decade. It’s time to address why government hiring systems are incompatible with modern delivery head on.
The digital government field has a decade’s worth of proofs of concept for what works and what doesn’t. To scale, we need repeatable processes, standard approaches, and a common understanding of what quality outcomes look like for end users.
This growing industry doesn’t have enough assets to create the common pathways, vocabulary, and training that compounds individual talent into a thriving field
Success should be defined by how constituents (i.e., users) engage with the service is changed; not how the government teaming around the service changes. A service manual exists, adopt it!
Build toward service team models, organized around user-defined services, empowered end-to-end, with accountable ownership.
Develop distinct teaming models for different modes of work: crisis response, modernization, implementation, product building, operations and maintenance.
A Forward Looking Agenda
This is the moment for ambitious change. The digital government field has an opportunity to build a more responsive and resilient government by pushing into new frontiers, with new tools, approaches, and even organizations that don’t exist yet. While the pace of change can be overwhelming, there is something clarifying about a moment when people are questioning the value of institutions themselves. This is the time for radical experimentation, delivery, and exploration.
The Digital Retros project made possible thanks to the Federation of American Scientists and Georgetown University’s Beeck Center. The project team includes Merici Vinton, Faith Savaiano, and Kirsten Wyatt. Thank you to Laura Sigelmann, Leya Moshin, Loren DeJonge Schulman, and Lynn Overman.
This report stems from original research and synthesis. We made use of generative AI tools, Claude Sonnet 4.6, for comparative analysis and and minor instances of the editing process. All final insights and language have been revised and reviewed by personnel.