Rebecca Woodbury of San Rafael, CA, shares how she's been leading efforts to reorganize the city’s IT department, promoting human-centered design, and developing a local government product manager playbook.
Rebecca Woodbury, Director of Digital Service & Open Government for the City of San Rafael, CA, and Govlaunch dive into the city's progressive department focused on modernizing local government. Rebecca provides insights into the methodology around product management, making the end-user experience their top priority, and how San Rafael is working towards a more efficient, more digital, delivery of services. Read more.
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Featured government: San Rafael, CA
Episode guests: Rebecca Woodbury, Former Director of Digital Service & Open Government
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation. And on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host.
Today, I chat with Rebecca Woodbury from San Rafael, California. She's been leading efforts to reorganize the city's IT department, promote citywide attention to human centered design, and develop a product management playbook that other local governments can use. As we're always looking to highlight the good work happening in smaller communities across the globe, and to share innovation resources, we're excited to hear from Rebecca and to find out what she and her team are up to.
Lindsay: (00:54)
Rebecca, thanks so much for joining me today. Can you quickly introduce yourself and share a bit about your role?
Rebecca: (00:59)
Hi, my name is Rebecca Woodbury and I'm the Director of Digital Service and Open Government for the City of San Rafael in California. My team supports city departments on content engagement strategy, on service design, data and technology.
Lindsay: (01:19)
So I know around two years ago, San Rafael established the digital service and open government division. Can you explain what this division is responsible for and how its structure differs from other innovation centric divisions?
Rebecca: (01:33)
Sure. Uh, you know, there's a lot of different approaches to this happening around the country and the world for that matter. Um, we see innovation teams embedded in mayor's offices. We see digital teams within IT departments. We see digital teams outside of IT departments. Um, but as we were looking around at these examples, one of the things that we kept hearing though, was that often digital teams faced challenges with IT. And so to overcome the potential for this, we decided to make the traditional IT function of the digital department. So in essence, IT reports upward to digital. And we chose to create a department rather than an embedded team in hopes to create more organizational capacity over time.
Rebecca: (02:25)
When we work with other departments, we are there to learn with them and support them. We aren't there to do it for them, right. We know we don't have all the answers. We partner with and support the other city departments to help them redesign their services. Sometimes it's content related and we help them with their webpages and engagement strategies. Other times it's a process challenge and we help them with their user research and journey mapping. Um, we also advise on and support software procurements. At the end of the day, I see us as really being an advocate for user needs and experience and everything that we do. In the early days of the pandemic, for example, that meant electronic forms and signatures for our internal HR and finance departments. A little later, it meant working with planning and public works on an automatic permitting process for outdoor dining. Throughout the pandemic, we have led our public information efforts, creating signage, social media, and regular informational updates to the community. Um, and our biggest project during the pandemic was building a free wifi network in our most underserved neighborhood because digital services are pretty useless when you don't have access to the internet.
Lindsay: (03:40)
Right? Yeah. We've heard a lot of local governments doing this creating these pop-up if you will, wifi networks for these underserved communities. So that's fantastic. When establishing a new department from scratch, there's obviously a lot of organization wide training that needs to happen. What are some of the things you focused on in terms of training and staff development?
Rebecca: (04:02)
Sure. So for several years now, uh, I've been coordinating a city-wide training program called the learning lab. We've created this program with our partners at CivicMakers, um, where we form cross-departmental teams who learn how to apply human centered design to a work challenge. So over the years we've had teams work on illegal dumping, um, internal knowledge sharing, onboarding, cross-departmental permits, homeless encampments, and just a lot more topics than that. Um, but through this and other kind of related training opportunities through this work, we've really socialized the concept of human centered design throughout the organization, which is really cool. It's been both in our safety and our non-safety departments, and really we focused on socializing this at all levels, you know, from the frontline all the way up to the director level. And building off of that work, I've been working with my team to incorporate product management methods into how we work with other departments.
Rebecca: (05:02)
So this mindset really helps to reinforce again, the importance of user needs and to make sure that they are paramount throughout the design process. I find oftentimes it's easy to have the user needs top of mind at the outset, but, you know, as fatigue sets in at the end of a project, most people are just trying to get it done. And unfortunately user needs can kind of unintentionally get deprioritized, but a product mindset really, I think can prevent that from happening. So we've started to create a product management playbook, and we have a product framing template that we use at the start of projects, which really helps us to introduce concepts of user stories, problem definition, vision and success metrics with the departments that we're working with.
Lindsay: (05:51)
I’m super excited to hear about this concept of project management or product management in local government. We covered this a few weeks ago with the city of Richmond, Virginia. They're doing a lot of work around taking ownership of their specific vendors and seeing a product through. So I want to talk more about this as a way of framing the work around service delivery. Can you explain why you think the specific approach is the most effective when looking to really improve service delivery?
Rebecca: (06:20)
Sure. Product management in the public sector, I think is a really interesting concept. You can't just replicate the private sector approach. You know, we're not trying to get people addicted to getting parking tickets. I'm not sold that all government services have to be totally quote unquote delightful, but they sure as heck shouldn't be painful. They shouldn't mean taking a day off work to get something done. Right? So the idea that you should care about people's time and how hard or confusing things are for them is something we need to spend a lot more time learning and caring about. Um, another aspect that product management helps us with is that I also think the notion that public sector doesn't have competition, isn't true. You know, people can choose to go to libraries and community centers in the town next door, or people can choose to not get a permit or not pay a parking ticket.
Rebecca: (07:15)
And when people choose not to do these things, the outcomes down the road are not ones I think anybody wants. And so when you think of people not doing these things as your competition, then it really makes you look deeply at how easy something is to accomplish or who do you need to better design things for to increase compliance. And I also think it's important to consider the frontline staff involved in transactions. If we care about them as people, and also the efficient spending of taxpayer dollars, we need to care about their time. And if we care about good customer service, we need to care about their frustrations and pain. So the customer and the employee experience are also just really inextricably linked. And we need to look holistically at both.
Lindsay: (08:06)
You've published some really great product management resources, including this project framing template. If I'm a local government employee and curious about this and leveraging more of this philosophy in my government, how would I access these resources?
Rebecca: (08:20)
Sure. Uh, we have a public facing employee website where we share these resources, as well as a lot of information about the culture work we've been doing for the past few years. So we have, uh, an in progress, product management playbook, and also a lot of information about the learning lab program that I shared earlier. Uh, the site is employees.cityofsarafael.org, and also available on Govlaunch.
Lindsay: (08:47)
Fantastic. Yeah, we're trying to amass more of these resources as a one-stop shop for local governments, looking to find useful tools like this. So, uh, thanks for that. Um, do you have an example of a service San Rafael has been able to really improve as a result of this work?
Rebecca: (09:04)
Yeah. We use this approach, uh, over the pandemic actually to build a crowdsourced countywide open restaurant map. Um, prior to the map, staff was maintaining a webpage that had like just a long list of open businesses that were kind of categorized and I think alphabetically listed, but it was really time consuming to try to maintain. And it didn't really seem all that helpful to just scroll through a list. So we use this approach to help determine our audience and how to make something really easy to maintain and also determine what it's not right. It's not Yelp, it's not Google, we're not trying to compete with that, but it did turn into a way that we could give restaurants full control of their listings, highlight minority owned businesses, promote COVID health guidance, and also just show our support for our local restaurant community.
Lindsay: (09:57)
That's a fantastic example. And I think really points as well to the benefit of creating tools that allow local businesses and the community to engage in really the content versus you haven't have staff to maintain this content yourself. Uh, so I think that's a really important piece. You also bring up the mapping piece. This is obviously a hot topic, uh, GIS, mapping. People like to see things in terms of proximity to where they are. And so taking advantage of that technology is really fantastic as well. You mentioned earlier the project that has been really spurred by COVID response. Um, can you share more about how you went about setting up this neighborhood wifi network for the underserved community you mentioned?
Rebecca: (10:42)
Sure. When the shelter in place order sent a bunch of kids home for remote schooling, we started scrambling to help the school district get underserved children connected. So through this, just some really amazing partnerships formed between the County, the city's school district and nonprofits, and these efforts have led to the distribution of hundreds of hotspots and thousands of Chromebooks. Um, and in our most underserved and dense neighborhood, we built a free wifi network. This is a neighborhood with mostly immigrant families, thousands of children in the school system.
And over the summer, it also bore the brunt of the pandemic with high coronavirus positivity rates. Uh, so we built a landing page for the wifi network that connects people with information about COVID testing, health guidance, eviction protection, food resources, remote learning, and mental health resources. Um, and since we're in California and blackouts are now a thing, we built the network with that in mind. So not all but portions in the network are connected to sites where we have generators, a pump station, a community center, a County health facility. So during a major power outage, there will be areas of the neighborhood where people can get the internet when home internet connections will be down. Um, another aspect about this network that I'm curious to see is the impact it could have on people's cell phone bills. My hypothesis is their bills will go down. Uh, the more they rely on it instead of their data plans, we did a survey over the summer, and, uh, we found that around 20% of the respondents in this neighborhood said they rely on their cell phone data plan as their primary internet connection. And that can get really expensive.
Lindsay: (12:28)
Right? Uh, well, and then this focus on resilience too. You did this project in response to the pandemic, but really, it probably makes sense to have something like this in place on generator backups in California anyway with the frequent power outages, I know that you all have experienced over the last few years. Um, I want to talk now a bit more about the unique challenges, specifically small to medium-sized local governments face. You've been with San Rafael, which has a population right around 60,000 people for about 12 years now. And you've been involved in a lot of different areas during your tenure. What would you say has been the biggest challenge, San Rafael faces as a smaller local government?
Rebecca: (13:10)
Yeah. As a small local government, we rely heavily on vendors. We can't build or maintain much in house. So oftentimes with certain procurements, um, it can feel like we're picking between the chicken, the chicken, or the chicken, and they're all dry and really, you're just trying to figure out which one will give you salmonella. So fortunately, you know, we're seeing more startups that are making inroads in our sector. However, it's still challenging, you know, in the enterprise software space, um, and working with startups can be great, but in my experience, it also takes a lot of internal social capital and trust to work with startups. So there's a challenge there.
Lindsay: (13:56)
Did you ever engage with civic, hacker groups, like code for America, or was this opportunity not available just do the size of San Rafael?
Rebecca: (14:03)
Yeah, we've dabbled, but we're kind of too small, you know, the hacker groups and networks in like Oakland and San Francisco, they're great communities, but Marin is, I think just a little too much of a bedroom community for that to have taken off yet. You know, we have made attempts, but nothing really has taken a foothold like it has in those larger cities nearby. Um, we have found one way of participating though. Uh, for the past two years, we've sent about 20 staff to the code for America summit, um, in Oakland, which for a city, our size is really crazy cool that we're able to do that. And employees just love this conference and always walk away super inspired.
Lindsay: (14:44)
What specifically from those conferences, are, is your staff getting training or, um, notification of new technologies or ways of addressing challenges?
Rebecca: (14:54)
Yeah, all of, all of that, but I think actually the most valuable thing they do is make, uh, connections with other people and get super inspired. I think that, you know, the conference has a variety of different opportunities for people to take part in, but some of the most powerful experiences are the main stage talks that just leave people really inspired by, you know, what's possible. And I think that really opens up people's minds to thinking differently about things and they come back to the work, the workplace, really looking closely at how they're doing things. And so that, that inspiration is really powerful.
Lindsay: (15:33)
Yeah. I always like to ask that question cause I hear very different responses from everybody that I talked to, you know, a lot of people think conferences, it's get everybody to get them all jazzed and excited. They come back to work, they're excited for a week and then everything goes back to the way it was before.
Um, we've heard that a lot, uh, the size limitation being a big hurdle why local governments can't get access to these types of resources and really a primary driver of why we built Govlaunch. So local governments, especially these smaller communities have access to see what's working for their peers to solve similar challenges across the globe and really to access also these technology solutions and startups like you mentioned ones that you might not have ever known about before, or wouldn't have access to if you're not attending conferences, if you don't have a robust procurement team researching all the available tools out there, it's really hard to find some of these companies. So e've tried to make it easier to find technologies and innovation strategies, that there really hasn't been a, a way of cataloging these things before and finding it.
Rebecca: (16:41)
Yeah, exactly. I was an early advocate of Govlaunch and your mission. I think it's imperative that all size governments have the tools and information to innovate successfully and small governments tend to be left behind. That's where Govlaunch really fills the information gap, giving both small and medium-sized governments the opportunity to be part of the innovation narrative.
Lindsay: (17:05)
Yeah, exactly. Um, and I, I hope that one day we'll look at this and go, we know you no longer have to make the choice between the chicken, the chicken and the chicken. Um, so changing gears a little, I'd like to ask a few more general questions if you're game. So as a leader of a smaller local government, what innovation advice would you share with others that are facing the same challenges you have?
Rebecca: (17:30)
People need to be inspired and motivated to do this work. So finding ways to incorporate that into your culture. We have this video that we like to share with staff. It's a Jennifer Pahlka talk and probably half our workforce has probably seen it by now. And it really helps to get people inspired again about what's possible. So I really think again, like our culture work that we've done, you know, appreciates the inextricable link between the customer experience and the employee experience. And I think that that's a critical piece of all of this.
Lindsay: (18:07)
And even subtle things like your structural changes, where you have the IT department reporting to your group, um, as a way of structuring that, where it's going to be a lot more collaborative and focused on the end user experience. I think that is, is a really interesting way of looking at it. So do you have a govtech product that you would highly recommend and why?
Rebecca: (18:29)
Hands down, it's ProudCity, if you're a small or medium-sized city, it is, in my opinion, the perfect platform for your website and digital services, your staff will thank you. And your constituents will too.
Lindsay: (18:47)
Fantastic. Well, I'll have to call them up and get them on the podcast. What's something you've tried that failed or didn't work out as you had planned?
Rebecca: (18:56)
Where do I start? I have a long list. Um, one example is several years ago, I tried to do an open data portal this, gosh, it might've been, I don't know, five years ago or something. And I just, I did not spend enough time getting the internal buy-in for it to be successful. So it, it really never took off. And the way that I, um, naively thought it would, but it's actually fine that it didn't because looking back now, I really didn't have the right approach.
Lindsay: (19:26)
So many local governments are focused on this and, uh, there's so many foundational things that have to happen. We've covered this a lot on Govlaunch, that before you can get to the point that you have some flashy portal that your residents can come to and see and interact with and do things on a map. And a lot of it comes down to these like data silos or just not having good, good data integrity internally. Can you kind of break down a little bit more for me what your structure was, or maybe the things that you would have done differently?
Rebecca: (19:58)
Yeah. I mean, I did all, I did all that wrong, um, and didn't appreciate or understand all of that very thoroughly at the time. Uh, and, and then in essence, you know, this started out by looking at our, at our budget and our financial information. I worked closely with them, but didn't take the time needed. I think moved a little too quickly to get the buy-in that we needed for it to be really successful. Um, and but everything you said is also true. We weren't thinking about it from the right approach. I think we were thinking about it from that public facing aspect and weren't thinking of everything that needed to be underneath it.
Lindsay: (20:39)
It's like, we've got to build the blueprint of the house before we go and pick out the paint colors, right? Earlier, you mentioned, uh, the limitation smaller to medium sized governments have where you're, so vendor reliant, is there a reason you all didn't look to vendors? I know that if you were specifically looking at financial information, there's a ton of vendors out there that help with participatory budgeting and giving visualizations to that type of data. And they actually do some work. Some of them, um, I'm aware of that will help you clean up the data that you have, if you have some data integrity problems, um, on the backend. Uh, did you guys research any vendors for this, or do you think part of the struggle was that you tried to build this in house when maybe you didn't have the staff or the resources to do it?
Rebecca: (21:25)
Oh no, we, we worked with a vendor. We didn't build it in house. We worked with OpenGov who were great. Um, we enjoyed working with them. Again, it was more of the people side on our end. Um, that was the challenge. Uh, it wasn't necessarily the platform that we were using.
Lindsay: (21:44)
Well, Adrianne Halloway and I were speaking a few weeks ago and she talked about the difficulty with stakeholder buy-in. As you know, she's the former CIO for Aurora, Illinois. And so Aurora, Illinois is a very innovative, progressive place. And even a city of her size with its reputation, she had some real difficulty throughout her career there with stakeholder buy-in. And I know something that a lot of innovators in the space have reported that if you can't get city council on board or your city manager on board with some of these initiatives, it makes it really challenging to push for innovation.
Rebecca: (22:22)
Yeah. I think sometimes it just takes a lot more time. Um, then sometimes, you know, it's kind of a trade-off that you have to factor in like how much time am I willing to spend getting the buy in that I need for this. Um, and, and sometimes it feels like timing is everything with some of these projects, and you've got to take the time to do it right. And then when that time comes, you have to seize the day.
Lindsay: (22:54)
Your project management playbook that you're creating, like the whole idea of project management is you gotta have a plan and you have to clearly outline that and document that. That's the first step in getting stakeholder buy-in is documentation and having done your research. So, um, a lot of great advice you've shared today. Um, my last question, and you've got some exciting news to share, but what's something that excites you about the future of San Rafael. Yeah.
Rebecca: (23:19)
Yeah, this might sound a little weird, but I'm excited that I'm leaving at the end of the year and you can apply for my job.
Lindsay: (23:28)
She doesn't mean me. I'm not applying for the job.
Rebecca: (23:31)
Yeah. It's um, it's a really cool job. Um, after 12 amazing years in San Rafael, I am now writing a new chapter in my book and it involves more time zones. I'm so proud of what I've helped create in San Rafael. And I am, I'm really excited to see what the next person does with it. So, uh, DMV on Twitter, if you want my job.
Lindsay: (23:57)
Well I can vouch, having lived just right around the corner just North of San Francisco, that this it's a fantastic place to be. San Rafael is a beautiful little community. So I would encourage any of you listening to message Rebecca if you have any interest in the position, but we're excited for you, Rebecca. And, uh, thanks again for being part of the Govlaunch community. And we're excited to continue, even though you're moving on to still glean some of your insights and, um, and to learn about what you're working on next. So thanks again.
Speaker 2: (24:28)
Thank you.
Lindsay: (24:34)
Despite the resource and budget constraints, smaller local government space, we've seen innovation coming from even the smallest teams, oftentimes having to overcome some serious barriers to get there.
Rebecca speaks today about the larger issue and that's around the limited tools she and her team has access to with very few companies looking to these smaller local governments and competing for their business communities who collectively have enormous buying potential are left without any resources to help identify game-changing products in the market. At Govlaunch, we're connecting local governments of any size with the innovative practices and tools available to them so that together we can build stronger, more resilient communities.
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.