Reflections: Serving as a Product Management Fellow on MyFile NYC

I am a graduate student in the Master of Science, Public Policy and Management - Data Analytics, with Carnegie Mellon University. For the past academic year, I had the privilege of working at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity as a Product Management Fellow in partnership with the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative at New America.

This article summarizes my reflections on what I learned about working on a public digital solution, the MyFile NYC pilot, with the city of New York. I am interested in learning more about policy making and how to design effective policies that genuinely help the people it was designed for.

The team I worked with at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity is dedicated to improving the provision of government by advancing the use of research, data and design in program and policy development, service delivery, and budget decisions. This includes analyzing existing anti-poverty approaches, developing new strategies, facilitating the sharing of data across City agencies, and rigorously assessing the impact of key initiatives.

Prior to this fellowship experience, I was a product developer and scrum master in the defense industry. I believe in creating high impact products that affect millions of people.

MyFile NYC

MyFile NYC is a mobile optimized digital solution for the City to reduce the time and effort expended by all parties on collecting documents and records through a web application for residents to store, retrieve, and share vital documents with the Department of Homeless Services (DHS). Missing documentation is a commonly cited reason for application denials for safety net benefits and programs. Residents may not be able to easily retrieve specific documents and this contributes to time and effort expended by both residents and government employees.

MyFile NYC was created in collaboration with New America’s Digital Impact and Governance Initiative (DIGI). MyFile seeks to reduce the time-burden and complexity of providing identification documents to the City when applying for benefits. The solution launched as a pilot initiative with DHS’s Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) Center in the Bronx in 2022. PATH is an intake center for families with children experiencing homelessness.

I definitely honed in on working with different technologies for MyFile NYC. My prior tech development experience working in the defense industry relied on an old tried and true formula, using a well known OOP language and incorporating DevOps to deploy and containerize our components onto the cloud. The MyFile NYC team is a bit more adhoc - more agile and startup-like. The team uses whatever gets the job done and what our engineers know. This means using TypeScript, Node.JS and well known web development tools.

MyFile NYC is open source. One of the great things about working with New York City governance is we have access to an amazing pool of talent and those that advocate for open source. Transparency in government is a breath of fresh air.

Phase 1 Pilot Report

One of the first tasks I worked on as a Fellow was completing a three month pilot report. At the PATH Center, five team members were assisting in the pilot. Four were part of the Document Management team and one person was engaging with families directly to help them sign up. To help with understanding this, we were shared a workflow of the entire process on Miro. From this we had a big picture idea of who does what and the steps taken to help the client. On the backend, we looked at various analytics. 80% of families completed the account creation process. 75% of families were able to upload documents. We realized that there was a 40% drop off rate from when people create an account to uploading documents, which became one of the biggest challenges we addressed. 56% of families were able to share documents with the Center via our solution.

From this we were able to discover that the signup process had to be readdressed. Currently we use NYC.ID but we can’t assume everyone has an email address.. Access to a device and reliable internet access was also a challenge. Another challenge is that English is not the first language of many families at PATH. In fact, NYC requires all government agencies to translate key information into the 11 common languages spoken in the city.

Main Features

Multipage and Translation Work

After analyzing the metrics from the pilot report, we realized we need to work on two major revisions: 1. Multiple language accommodation; and 2. Multi-page document support.

We could not ship a new release until all 11 main languages were implemented. New York City once again is on top of this. We compiled all the text in our app and sent over a document with the text that had to be translated to a translation partner. Their job is solely to localize into other languages. We then went back and pasted in the new languages, but here had to be design changes.

The other main feature we worked on was multi-page support. At the time a user could only upload one image/document at a time. This was impractical given that users would sometimes have 30+ page documents, such as tax forms. A single page only works if it’s a Social Security Number, Birth Certificate, or Driver’s License. This also required a redesign of the website and as such it was worked on in tandem with the translation work.

New Design

Part of our ambition was to redesign the interface now incorporating the multi-page user experience, with changes for the language translation. We briefly started this work in the last quarter of 2022 but unfortunately our Product Designer left and we were waiting to hire someone to fill their place. It was unfortunate but they had left a lot of mockup designs on Figma which made the transition easier in January. In the meantime, I had sent out the translations and waited for them to come back. Once we had a new Product Designer we went through and did robust QA of the website to see what was needed from a user design perspective. We developed a button to support multi-page as well as figuring out the placement of the language selection. In our current design, a user selects the language from the landing page and it carries over even after they’ve logged in.

For those familiar with languages, this may be no surprise, but to me I quickly found out that some languages have long characters, some are short. Languages like Urdu and Arabic are right-to-left so we essentially redesigned our website mirrored on the X-axis. We also had one-pagers explaining the functionality of our application, and those had to be translated as well, matching the same design philosophy.

Along the way we fixed a lot of bugs.

Video Explainer

Our most recent project was to create a Video Explainer showcasing how to sign up and use our product – these videos can run on the screens at the PATH center. We had our UX Designer come up with mockups and then learn how to use After Effects to create the animation. We have also translated the app into Spanish and French voice overs.

Conclusion

I learned a lot from my experience at the Mayor’s Office. From the Sync Up meetings, to getting a better sense of the operations of the Office of Technology and Innovation, to being in meetings with the Product Director and talking to prospective clients about additional use cases. I am really excited to see where this digital public solution can go as many agencies have expressed interest in it. It doesn’t get better than this working in public interest and civic technology. It helps that this product was developed like a startup because it taught me a lot about the software development process and has allowed me to hone my skills in management which is what I was aiming for. Looking back I think if there were opportunities to be more technical, I could have benefitted from that. But the work was meaningful, considering the amount of agencies interested in the product, we can no longer have a part time Product Manager. We scaled the solution to a point where it requires full time commitment from a dedicated Product Manager and I am proud of that.