A few years ago, I joined 18F because I cared about building service design capacity within government. From 2014 to 2025, 18F was a unit within the General Services Administration (GSA) that helped other government agencies make smarter technology investments by solving organizational, service design, and procurement problems (that often masqueraded as technology problems)

Prior to 18F, I had been working at a vendor that set out to do things differently, yet still ran into the inevitable limitations of a contract-led service delivery apparatus. My ability to make an impact through service design was constrained by what was in the contract and how we operated outside of the organization. Even if you are a vendor with good intentions, you will never fully know how communication, influence, and decisions flow through a government agency. Instead of being boxes on an agency org chart, you are a dotted line that ends at a black box, trying to make sense of it all.

18F had leverage. We may have had somewhat of an outside vantage point because we were an internal consultancy, but we still had the currency of being government employees. Rather than working with “clients”, we worked with “partners”. We were not out to win contracts. We could work upstream of procurement and enable our partners to run essential service delivery work. We coached. We instilled confidence in our partners’ abilities. We stepped away, rather than encourage dependency.

Why service design?

Service design is not the magic bullet solution to better service delivery. But service design is the connective tissue between the people, policies, processes, and systems that together deliver value to the public. Having this cross-cutting capability at the ready, in house, means that government employees can navigate toward more effective outcomes for the people they serve. Government service designers have the vantage point to understand and experience how decisions are made and how communication flows. They can set standards and policies for how their agency or state learns from the public, and compensates them in turn.

Why now?

Even though – or maybe, especially because –  the current administration dismantled 18F last year, my mission remains the same. Service design in government is a precious commodity.

At the federal level, internal design capacity has been shrinking. Other federal units that valued and enabled design capacity were also dismantled, like The Lab at OPM, or sabotaged, like the U.S. Digital Service. 

Meanwhile, states have been left to pick up the pieces. They are sprinting to implement H.R.1 work requirements, figuring out how to maintain or replace their own legacy IT systems, while also tapping into the hiring pool of former feds who still want to serve. 

Yet some states have begun prioritizing in-house service design. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts included “service designer” as a core role to consider for building an experience design and research team. Most recently, the State of Colorado’s Office of Information Technology included service design as a core competency in their new operating model. (Side note: Colorado is hiring Senior Service Designers! Their job listing closes on June 22 at 12 am MT.)  

What’s next 

Capacity building is so much more than hiring a service designer, or even multiple service designers. It’s about establishing conditions within government to enable service designers to thrive and make an impact. It’s about furthering and adopting a service design mindset, even if you are not a service designer. It’s about influence, communication, organization design, knowledge sharing, support, and so much more. How can government agencies begin to set these conditions, especially if so much of their bandwidth is consumed by fighting fires?

I plan on using this space to write about service design capacity inside government: why it is important, why it is hard, how to get started, and where I see momentum.

If there are any topics you are especially interested in, drop me a line at amanda [at] msamandakennedy [dot] com

Thanks for reading!