05 / PLATFORM STRATEGY

GOVERNMENT CLOUD

Turning a fragmented family of civic-data products into a connected platform—and a launch story that helped make Socrata's strategic value visible.

MY SCOPEPRODUCT DESIGN MANAGER / WORKFLOW + LAUNCH DIRECTIONTEAMDESIGN, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT + ENGINEERINGTIMEFRAME2017—2018

01 / THE PROBLEM

Socrata had powerful products for bringing data in, exploring it, visualizing insights, and communicating results, but customers still had to carry the complexity between them. Government Cloud needed to become both a working platform and a credible story about how public-sector teams could move from internal operations to public transparency.

02 / THE EVIDENCE

We mapped government scenarios across product boundaries, built physical story maps, and translated them into delivery slices. I also examined whether existing federation and connector technology could support the intended internal-to-public workflow. In a simulated environment spanning departments, administrators, data owners, and anonymous residents, the proposed configuration broke during the third scenario—making the platform risk visible while there was still time to change course.

03 / THE DECISION

Anchor the MVP in four connected flows: get data in, explore it, visualize insights, and add context. The narrative and the workflow became one design problem: every claim in the launch story needed a path the product could actually execute. Design spikes and scenario testing were used to resolve the most consequential gaps before the roadmap was treated as settled.

04 / THE COLLABORATION

I owned the end-to-end workflow, worked directly with the product-management team to create the platform narrative, and partnered directly with engineering to execute the version that was produced. I also coordinated design work around the milestones so the customer journey, product story, and implementation evolved together.

05 / THE OUTCOME

Government Cloud launched, but the work did not resolve into a conventional optimization phase. The platform and the story it made possible contributed directly to Socrata's acquisition by Tyler Technologies. That changed the objective and the timeline: success became preparing the team for the news, carrying the product logic into conversations with new Tyler colleagues, and helping the organization move from launch into integration.

06 / THE REFLECTION

A launch can be an inflection point rather than a finish line. In this case, the most meaningful outcome was not a clean post-launch metric—it was that the product made Socrata's future legible enough to change the company around it.

PROJECT EVIDENCE6 ARTIFACTS

Cross-functional story-mapping workshop with Kyle Hall, Micaela Eaves, and engineering managers — 01 / Kyle Hall, Micaela Eaves, two engineering managers, and I used story mapping to deconstruct the workflow for restructuring Socrata’s data-visualization tools.

Temporary wall map comparing data-management products and workflows — 02 / After story-mapping individual features, we traced comparable workflows across the data-management market. This temporary landscape worked like a literature review of product offerings: broader than the competitive analysis that followed, and useful for planning our own feature set against what was available in the market.

Government-program workflow maps abstracted into a shared planning model — 03 / We mapped real government programs individually, then abstracted their workflows into a shared planning model. That helped us define features capable of supporting a wider range of programs, needs, and value propositions without designing for only one scenario.

Early sketch of the Government Cloud obtain, explore, model, and use workflow — 04 / An early sketch reduced the platform to four connected jobs—obtain, explore, model, and use—so the launch narrative and product workflow could be designed together.

Government Cloud concept for centralizing source data — 05 / The homelessness scenario tested the first promise: centralize source systems, spreadsheets, and reference data without losing the distinctions government teams needed.

Connected Communities platform, program, and data-collection model — 06 / The Connected Communities model treated the platform as an organism, programs as molecules, and individual data collections as atoms—an abstraction for reasoning across very different government use cases.