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It’s a dynamic all too familiar for policy practitioners: a policy fails, not because it’s the wrong idea, but because government systems and bureaucracies fail to deliver.

A law passes, an executive order is signed, a rule is established, a program is stood up, but the intended recipients never receive the benefit. Too often we fail to achieve the intended outcome of a hard fought policy win—whether because of a lack of capacity in the workforce to execute on one more initiative, burdensomely long sign-up forms, a confusing or ill constructed website, or a call center that’s overwhelmed by long wait times. 

This gap between the public’s experience with government and the policymaking process is why public interest technology is such a vital area of practice for those working in and around government—and why we were so excited about New York City’s announcement that they were , the city’s first ever public interest technology initiative. Designed to bring together multi-disciplinary teams of problem solvers, including product managers, designers, engineers, and user researchers, the PIT Crew is designed to solve real problems for New Yorkers in months rather than years. 

This isn’t just one new app or one new government service: the PIT Crew represents that centers humans in the policymaking process, relies on empirical customer research,  and pushes government agencies to be more nimble, running small experiments and pilot programs before scaling up. 

Public interest technology is a practice near and dear to the work we do at the New Practice Lab and �鶹������ý.  �鶹������ý, over the years, has worked to give voice to the idea that delivery is as important as policy. �鶹������ý, nearly a decade ago launched Public Interest Technology fellows and later built and spun out the Public Technology University network — designed to link colleges and universities that are pioneering cross-disciplinary. We wrote books, like Power to the Public, launched classes at the Harvard Kennedy School on , and at the McCourt School of Public Policy, because we wanted this way of working to travel beyond any one program or any one administration. 

We also helped create and build cross-agency that sought to improve trust in government through concrete service improvements by focusing on people’s experience, not government silos – the incredible a PIT Crew leader, is an alumni of the Life Experience effort focused on . And, we’ve learned lessons from the establishment of teams and managing projects that integrated technical expertise into government like 18F, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, the United States Digital Service, the Lab@OPM and the Office of Evaluation Sciences—all of whom played key roles in interdisciplinary collective work and transformation efforts across the U.S. government which PIT and others can look to.  

Now, our team at the Lab’s way of operating—multi-disciplinary teams, bringing human-focused research and expertise to government agencies—is designed because we know that that’s the way teams work and deliver best. It’s inherent to how we’ve structured our practices on our team: design, technology, policy, and evaluation. Team members with different backgrounds bring their expertise to the table, and are capable of examining problems from all sides. Because it can take some muscle building to work in new ways with colleagues of different backgrounds, we each bring to build understanding of how we each strengthen our work. 

What makes the PIT Crew worth celebrating isn’t just that it exists. It’s being presented as the new way the government should work. Because as , “every simpler experience strengthens trust. New Yorkers shouldn’t have to understand how government is organized to get the services they need.” 

That New York City is choosing to build this capacity in-house rather than hand it to a consultancy that will finish the contract and walk away with the institutional knowledge is hugely important. In-house teams stick around. They learn agency constraints. They come back next year to fix what didn’t work the first time. They deliver technology for the sake of public outcomes. That is how you build a government that gets better instead of a government that just gets a new coat of paint every few years.

With a team focused on outcomes, we have faith that the PIT Crew can reshape how policymakers think about governance. 

We’ll be watching the PIT Crew closely, cheering for the wins, and ready to be useful if the lessons from our sprints can help. Because this is exactly what we hoped would happen when we started this work: that a way of building government—small teams, close to the problem, close to the people, moving fast and staying humble—would stop being an experiment and start being how cities, states, and national governments build. New York City just took a real step in that direction.