12 Gaining skills, facing adversity, and modernizing services delivery with Amenity Applewhite
This week we talk to [Amenity Applewhite](https://twitter.com/amenity), Product Manager with the [City of Austin](http://www.austintexas.gov/). We chat about traversing through skill learning, facing adversity, and modernizing services delivery at the city.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [Susan Fowler](https://www.susanjfowler.com/home/)<br>- [Austin Alpha site](http://alpha.austin.gov/)<br><br><br>##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. Here we go with another of Civic Tech Chat. This week, we're joined by Amenity Applewhite, product manager with the city of Austin. We're going to talk with her a bit about three main themes. First, her path in life journey and how that's related to her career progression and the types of skills she's learned. Next, we're talk going to talk a bit about dealing with professional adversity, both her own personal experience with it as well as some advice she might have for others. And then last, we're gonna talk about her work with the city modernizing government services, and maybe we'll get to learn some gems from her own work there, trying to get it done with stakeholders and folks on the ground. So with all that said, let's go ahead and go right into the discussion. Amenity, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us here on Civic Tech Chat. To start us off, could you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a bit about what you do?
Sure. My name is Amenity Applewhite, and I work for the city of Austin. I've been there a little over two years, and I'm product managing the city's new website. It's in alpha right now. So So the URL is alpha.austin.gov. But once it's kind of reached a threshold of quality in terms of content and tested interfaces, then, that will will be the new URL, awesome.gov.
Oh, that sounds great. Now one of the questions that I like to start with after the introduction has to do with personal why. So could you tell us a bit about your personal why and how that drives you each day to do what you do?
For sure. I have been involved in open source software since I was in grad school, and I began using open source GIS software. And then for my thesis was building a CMS with WordPress and just start to realize what, what value there was in software that was free that anybody could use, that there was a community to maintain and support users. So that's been a big driver to me to be able to work in a place where what's coming out of the organization is something that anyone can use. Then in terms of entering the civic realm, the city of Boston was new to me in that it was an employer. But I have been involved in neighborhood, activism for several years serving on, my neighborhood plan contact team, which is basically in charge of kind of reviewing zoning changes and sidewalk construction and demolition permits and all that type of stuff. And then basically going to, all the various commissions and trying to advocate for the neighborhood and what's best for it. So I actually really struggled a lot, interfacing with the city in a number of ways during that time. And one of the major ones was the website site and my inability everyone's inability to find content, to understand processes that were really important and, really bad forms. So I kind of got to the point I spent seven months in my friend's start up and reached a level of complete burnout and thought maybe this is time for me to have a job at the city where it's illegal for me to work over forty hours a week and, make a difference and fix all the things that have been bothering me. So that's in terms of why am I in government. That's that's that explanation.
I I'm getting the sense from what you're describing there that you might say that you're on a a bit of a tour of duty right now, in your time with the city. Is that a pretty accurate way to think about it? Sure. But at the same time, you know,
things things feel very precarious right now with our organization. But if if it got if everything straightens out as it appears that it might, then I could see myself working there, you know, for for quite a while. And I also feel like if I weren't working for the city of Austin, I would probably try to stay in in civic tech.
Oh, nice. So it it it sounds like the, the bug has definitely bit you, from the space. For sure. I noticed you have a, pretty interesting path That's where you've gotten now. That's included some roles like designer, developer, instructor, among other things. Would you be willing to share with us a bit about that journey?
Sure. I have been doing graphic design, for pretty much since I was 12, both for nonprofits on a volunteer basis and, in a paid capacity. I had a computer in my house since I was a little kid before any of my friends had computers. So the combination of being, like, a built in nerd and also being really interested in visual design kind of set me on that path pretty quickly. By the time I was choosing where to go to college, I decided that I wanted to go into design. I spent, eight months at Parsons School of Design in New York City and realized that I wasn't willing to give up a liberal arts education. And I wanted to be reading books, and I wanted to be, kind of in a different environment. So I left that. I I actually started teaching art, which kind of helped rehabilitate me as a from after that experience of, like, intense intense work, making, you know, drawing very, you know, structured making, quote, unquote, art in a very structured way. And so I was working with kids. I learned Spanish where I got to brush up my high school Spanish quite a bit because the students didn't speak English. And it was really, really wonderful to me. I went to Spain. From there, decided to move to Austin. They have the the best Latin American studies program in The United States, and my plan was to start there. But my first semester, I was in a class about was the geography of Latin America. And I read this article called GIS Sistas, and it was about empowering indigenous women to collect data, on to to use a GPS and collect data on the boundaries of their indigenous territory so that those could be, recorded in legal maps and and and help in as the government kind of decided where boundaries were and made those official. And the idea of empowering women in that way and the applicability of, of these new kind of tools to do that was huge to me. And, at the same time, being able to apply design principles, in cartography, it overlapping with kind of, anthropology and and geography was really appealing. So I ended up getting my my undergraduate in geography, my minor in anthropology. And from there, I got a grant from the European Union to get my master's in Spain and Germany. So I did, did my master's there, and it was on geospatial technology. During that time, as I mentioned before, I was introduced to open source software. I've been using proprietary GIS software, and I was a little horrified when when I, saw the open source software that we were using because it was buggy and it wasn't as robust. But, you know, my instructor said, you can learn how to drive in a Ferrari or a beat up old Volkswagen, and you're still learning how to drive. And as we were working with this software, we were able to submit bug reports and provide some internationalization. So it really appealed to me. I ended up doing my thesis on mapping creating a GeoCMS that could be crowdsourced, so a map that promoted artisanal food products in rural Spain. And I got to do exactly what I wanted, a combination of design and research and implementing the system. In implementing it, I just was able to reach out to developers, to these WordPress developers, and they would literally be, you know, on Google Chat. This is before Hangouts and screen sharing, but they'd be showing me how to use the JavaScript console and showing me, you know, some tricks, how to how to fix my PHP. And, it was amazing. And I built this site. I was very proud of at the time. It's painful to look at now, extremely dated, definitely down. But, it was a it was a great experience. I came back to The United States in the middle of kind of the tech crash in 2009, and it was not easy to get the jobs I was expecting to get, you know, working on Google Maps or working at Stayman Design in San Francisco. And so I kind of just, you know, I was living in Austin. It was a nice place to live. And I decided that I would take a job doing kind of creative assistant is what the title was at a company called Enthought. And they did scientific software consulting, but also was founded by the writers of SciPy and NumPy, which are scientific computing libraries for Python. So immediately went to another open source community that was pretty amazing, was working with really amazing people. And soon, the kind of creative assistant job expanded from updating the logo and fixing the home page of the site to, making training materials, illustrating, you know, kind of concepts of how, you could make quantitative analysis for financial data more efficient, using Python tools, and and kind of all of these things that was the best part of my job to sit down with some pretty brilliant people and have them kind of explain a concept, go draw it, have a circle back around with them, get some feedback, redraw. And and I had a great time there. I did user interface design. I managed webinars. I planned, SciPy, which is a conference for scientific computing for for two years. And, I decided to move on. I was, again, really burnt out working 70. And I went to the University of Texas to become the webmaster at the the School of Architecture. Immediately, my job was to take, to rebuild the site completely. I I have a thing about people saying, like, redesign the website because I've never actually replacing something completely. And that was definitely the case here. It was a site that was built in Flash. All the original files were lost. In order to update the home page, I would have to go and, like, decompile this weird Flash syntax and edit it. So meanwhile, I was trying to figure out, how to build a new site for the school of architecture on a very limited budget and working with a visual designer who didn't necessarily understand, mobile design and understand web implementation, but kind of working with them to take their branding that they created, make it into some designs, doing testing with that. And then in the meantime, joining the Drupal community. So there is a great Drupal community in Austin. I mean, really everywhere. And, I was also there's there was a really strong Drupal user group at UT. So UT had migrated their website to Drupal. And and basically, with the support of kind of all these various resources and and basically, you know, Google and figuring out how to do all these I was the only developer, to, the I was the only developer, to, the front end design and all the user testing. When it was complete, I kinda felt like my my job there was done and went to the aforementioned start up, which was a great experience, but also not somewhere that I wanted to stay. Ended up at the city, and here I am.
Well, that that is quite a journey. And there are a couple of themes that really kinda seem to stick out if you'll, entertain a little follow-up. One of them, of course, is like and you've mentioned this a bit as we've gone along already. This, like, idea of, like, empowering others seems to be at the core of, like, part of what you do. Mhmm. And another thing I noticed as you described that is you've had to learn, like, a very diverse set of different skills, that maybe at first glance maybe wouldn't naturally fit together, but you've found a way to, like, make them into tools for what you're trying to do. You could probably describe, like, what you've done there as being, like, being able to mold yourself like Clay, with these skills.
Could you talk a little bit a little bit about that experience? Is that something that is a skill that learning starts come naturally to you, or is that something you've had to foster over time? Sure. I mean, I am a generalist. I am a generalist at heart. I am insatiably curious. I ask a lot of questions. Some of them I know there's theoretically no stupid questions, but some of them, you know, I'm I'm not afraid to ask something very basic whether I'm talking to a designer or developer. And like I said, I mean, it's incredible to have Google and Stack Overflow, all these user communities. So I really have dabbled and made things work and pieced it together, maybe not always, as good as a full time, fully trained designer, developer, researcher. But it's been, you know, it's been great to try all of these things. At the same time, I struggle being a perfectionist with knowing, oh my gosh. There are designers out there that are so much greater than me. I need to go home and spend all my nights and weekends working on my portfolio and creating these perfect things. Or I can kind of hack some JavaScript, but I really, really, really need to know how to write jQuery. And I need to go home and read this big book that I just bought and figure out how to write some applications. And, you know, okay. I'm in user experience now, but I really I don't know, like, what to do with all these sticky notes everywhere. And just having to constantly feel like my whole life revolved around, kind of coming up to speed to be, the best at what I did was really exhausting. So moving into product management felt really natural to me since a lot of that role is moving in between different disciplines. And, so it it actually now what I'm doing is, kind of being a hub of communication and helping understand constraints, constraints from kind of all of these various disciplines and then working with stake holders to foster those relationships, collect their needs. And, you know, I'm writing a lot. I'm talking a lot and making a lot of decisions and and listening to people's reactions to them and reforming them. And it's just that is what comes naturally to me. So it's kind of a joy to be able to finally take all of that in and feel like I'm really built in to do what I'm doing.
And, adjacent to the professional work you've been doing, I also noticed in your background that you've you've got some nonprofit involvement there as well with a couple of organizations. The first one I'd like to ask you about is that, your leadership post in an organization called, Girl Develop It. It. Could you talk to us a bit about that organization, its mission, and what inspired you to, get involved?
Yeah. For sure. So Girl Development is a nonprofit organization. It is all over America, and they, they offer judgment free affordable classes for women to learn how to develop and write code. So I actually was introduced to Girl Develop It when I was at the school of architecture, found this application that was a total security risk, was asked to recreate it for a new semester, and realized I had to had to, scrap all the old code. And I didn't know how to store data and retrieve data from a MySQL database. So I took a class on PHP and MySQL. I think it was, like, four evenings, and it was awesome. I sat around a table with a bunch of women, and we learned how to do it. We had a woman instructor, and it was such a comfortable environment. I had always been around software developers, and they were great software developers, willing to help me. But there there was kind of that hesitancy, to to really feel like, I could ask every question I wanted and and help the people I was working with. So that was a great atmosphere. I took some more classes with them. I had a lot of opportunity at that time to kind of put into practice what I was doing. And soon, they started asking me to TA, so to sit in a class and kind of help the students with things, walk around, and answer questions when they were doing exercises. That was really wonderful. And, after that, I became became an organizer. So I would set up classes, kind of arrive ahead of time, work with the event host, send surveys to students after the class. And then they invited me to be a chapter leader, and I was really flattered. And it, I've been doing it for not too long. I think six months, maybe a year. But I basically, I work with another really awesome woman in town, and we organize series of events called Code and Coffee. So those are just us kind of settling down at a coffee shop for a morning and inviting anyone, whatever they're working on, to come and get some code review or get some suggestions. And through all of that, I've I've never been a great developer, but I can do my HTML and my CSS and my Sass and my basic command line. So it's it's really awesome to be able to not only teach people that, but show them that they can move up in a technology career without having to always be the best, at a specific thing but to understand
it. Oh, that that's fantastic. In particular, I really enjoyed that mention of the code and coffee that you organized there at the end as well. I I too think that's, like, that's a great space for folks that are just, like, seeking to learn at a pressure free place, which seems like it fits well in with that mission you mentioned for Girl Develop It. For sure. Yeah. And and men are totally welcome to,
to attend the classes. And sometimes we have these great male instructors, but they just have to know that they're probably gonna be the extreme minority in the room. So, as long as they can accept that, then they're it's, you know, open to everyone.
Oh, certainly. Now the, the second organization I wanted to ask you about, that I noticed in your background there is something that, is called the Sims Foundation, which I see you've cited as being your favorite Austin nonprofit. Could you tell us a bit about that one as well?
Yeah. So, I mean, Austin is known for being a music town, and, the the thing that's pretty unfortunate is that musicians often don't make a lot of money. So there are two great organizations in Austin. One of them is called Ham, and they provide health care to musicians. So basic dental care, they get them fancy earplugs, all sorts of things that musicians you know, a lot of musicians wouldn't go to the dentist if they didn't have a a pretty cheap way to do that. So I married a musician, and I found this organization, Sims too. So they're kind of the equivalent of hand, but they focus on mental health care and addiction recovery for musicians, which really struck a chord with me. Just, you know, from personal experience, family experience with mental health, and knowing that there's a huge stigma there, but then also realizing that musicians work in bars at night. Any I mean, they're artists, they're sensitive, they're creative, they, don't have money, they have these struggles, and they are really susceptible to, to addiction. And and, you know, for for the for Austin to be benefiting in, like, a touristic sense and just kind of in its own branding from, from the music scene, having a way to support musicians and, like, literally keep them alive, was a mission that really resonated with me. So I've been, yeah, I've just been volunteering there for a long time. A lot of times, it's just going to a music festival, going to ACL, going to, any of I mean, we have a million festivals here. So just tabling and letting musicians know that we're out there, and letting people who know musicians know that we're out there. So it's it's something I really enjoy doing.
Now before we switch from these life path type questions into some of our main subject material for this episode, I did have a couple questions that were, Twitter related for you. So one of them is, I have to ask, like, how psyched are you that you managed to claim one of the very rare first name based Twitter handles?
So psyched. I didn't even really realize the significance, you know, when I got it. I'm I'm very often the able to claim the first name things. I'm the first name on GitHub. I'm first name you know, I mean, joy of being one of the only amenities in the world.
Nice. And it's it's definitely smart that you've you've taken advantage of that. It's pretty cool that you're able to have the the nice, like, short and sweet handle. Yeah. I love it. Now related to that, we we did some some investigative digging here at Civic Tech Chat, and we discovered that your very first tweet on the platform is a question to Jennifer and Adam asking why you signed up. So I I I need to know. Did did they ever get back to you?
Well, yeah. They definitely got back to me because, Adam was my then boyfriend, then husband shortly after, and Jennifer was one of my best friends who's banned me. So they had started an account for their band and, you know, it's pretty funny to look back on now because they're horrible with social media, and I don't think they ever tweeted. But it was I didn't really know what Twitter was. I kind of felt a little annoyed that I had to join, so they had one more follower. But, so that's what's behind that tweet. And could definitely they could answer in person because I was living with them. So
Nice. So a little bit of love and some band music is what what got you started on Twitter there. Mhmm. So now I I think this is a good time for us to, change gears here into, some more of, like, our main content content type materials. And one of the things we talked about a bit when we were discussing what we would cover with this episode, was this kind of theme of of facing adversity. And in our conversations there, you mentioned a bit about having to find out about and and then struggle against some pretty considerable institutional sexism along your path. Are you willing to share with us a bit, about that experience?
Sure. So I was raised in a household. My dad had this mantra that was, like, girls are better, and he would say it all the time. So my sister and I, I think that we just always assumed that was true, and we went to school and we saw, obviously, girls were better. We're all smarter. So we, you know, we went my sister was one of the only is currently one of the only EMTs in the fire department. She was the first one to take the physical fitness test that the men took. So, yeah, one of the only female EMTs, I should have said. And she, yeah, she's a she's definitely a leader in doing things, from high school on being a firefighter that, that men usually do. Tech, which I've been doing for a long time, that was a guy thing too, and it never really occurred to me that it was a guy thing. But as I moved up into the tech world, like I said, I mean, I felt so supported by all these people I was working with constantly. At the same time, once I start to realize that they were getting paid, like, two, three times as much as me, for work that had equal value to the organization, I started to figure out that I needed to learn how to ask for a raise and just kind of accept the fact that that there were some some things, some just kind of built in salary expectations that I needed to kind of counter and take on myself. And once I started working with Girl Develop It and realizing, you know, my experience was pretty lucky being able to feel comfortable asking questions and talk to people. But a lot of women don't feel that, don't experience that. And then yeah. I'm just, I mean, basically, moving forward, coming into the city, I'm currently in a position where I'm paid a lot less than a lot of other, men on my in my realm of work. And, you know, I'm trying to tackle that, but it's just what happens. And then at the same time, you know, you kind of have, these like, Susan. I think her name is Susan Foster. She wrote this great microservices book that Fowler, her last name is Fowler, that I read last year when I was working on some microservices stuff. And she's the gal that, kind of wrote this letter post leaving Uber and called them out on this really horrific, chain of events where she was everything from harassed to, underpaid, underappreciated, and they basically drove her out of the organization. And, you know, then there was that Google email that went around. Women are inherently inferior. And so really starting to realize, like, this is even more than just women feeling comfortable or women getting their salaries, you know. But but this is, like, a really big thing, that we, you know, us the people who are already in it and who have progressed really need to show some leadership and advocate for ourselves in, ourselves, in you know, so that the the women that come after us have it better.
So I think maybe something I'm hearing there is, are you describing I guess, the the thing with pay is perhaps a symptom of of a deeper problem that causes that. Am am I hearing you Yeah. For sure. For sure. And I think that,
part of that is that engineers, are seen are are paid much more than, say, design researchers, product managers. I mean, then I mean, they're paid quite a bit. But really, once you understand user centered design, once you understand the value of team structures that are diverse with many disciplines, you you should understand that the the contributions to what people are bringing to the team are of equal value. So the fact that women tend to be in content strategy and design research, project management. That's part of it. But I'm seeing, like, I know a lot of women engineers who are paid less than their male counterparts. So for sure, it's it's a symptom, and there's some kind of, you know, factors behind it. But but, yeah, it's it's probably the most visible, easily quantifiable way to, to see this disparity in in action.
Hearing you talk about, your story, in particular with your experiences with with the pay gap there, I hear from you that, you know, you've had to put a significant amount of effort in, like, just trying to get that, fair pay that you're after. Could you tell us a little bit about, like, how you would approach coming over that difficulty? And maybe from your experiences in that, is there any advice you might give to, to others out there that are facing these types of struggles?
Oh, it's so funny. I have an email that I'm about to write. That is kind of a response to an email that I received, kind of trying to quell and deny some of my requests based on my last reclassification my doing now. And, gosh, doing it in government. When I was at a start up, I just went in to the HR guy and said I'd like a raise. He came back and said, I'm I'm so excited. I'm gonna give you a 3% raise. That's more than we give people normally in their first six months. And I said, no. No. I want, like, a raise raise, like, a big raise. And it was so hard for me to do that, but it, like, took ten minutes. This has taken me so much time, and this the pace, the glacial pace of government of government HR and and then just the convoluted process ease. The people that you have to interact with who are, like I mean, honestly, in my case, like, very unkind. And then also dealing honestly with, like, a lot of men in upper management, who come up with excuses why you shouldn't be paid why you shouldn't be paid what you deserve. And and, yeah, it's it's a it's a struggle. But what I'm doing is I'm basically you know, my solution to everything is make a spreadsheet. So I've kind of broken up all their classification point by point into, you know, what is this responsibility and role? How am I fulfilling it currently? What are my you know, breaking down my resume and showing that I have, you know, that actually doing data analysis and, you know, maps when I was an undergraduate should count as technical experience, which I was told it didn't. And using these and giving them to my my to my coworkers who are also I mean, we have some major problems right now. The the two lowest paid members of our team are, African American. And, you know, the lowest being the African American woman and really trying to make sure that they as I'm I'm working to advocate for myself, that everything that I'm doing, I can share with them. And, I mean, it's it's hugely important to me right now. It's a it's an interesting question for you to ask, like, right at this moment.
Yeah. It does sound like the timing is is is a bit uncanny there. But, perhaps, hopefully, folks out there in the audience will get to learn a bit from from what you're doing there. And perhaps, like, your your move there immediately going to the spreadsheet will, will prove to be fruitful.
Yeah. And, I should mention that, you know, there are some, like, woke people in the city that understand these old job descriptions and the pay scales are just not realistic. We're not gonna be able to get the the quality of people we need with technology as important as it is in delivering, government services. We're not gonna be able to do that if we don't offer some higher pay and also rewrite our job descriptions so they're not like you know, I'm right now, I'm business systems analyst. I'm trying to be a business systems analyst senior, and it's generic enough. I can fit myself into it. But, but we should really be asking applicants for for some modern skills. So there's definitely an effort ongoing to, to get these new job descriptions in there to get the pay scales that would relate to them. But and this is gonna probably come as no surprise to, the listeners of this podcast. It is a really slow process. So, you know, we're just trying to find a stopgap solution at this point.
Now you you may mention of the the idea of the, like, the descriptions that get written for these positions. Mhmm. In your view, does the maybe the manner that that practice is is gone about, does it contribute perhaps to to, like, the gap in that experience you see between, like, what would be fair pay and what wouldn't be just because of the manner in which these descriptions are written and the type of person that that would attract?
Yeah. I mean, for sure. So if you wanna work at the city of Austin right now, and I imagine this is not unique to us, you have to be willing to kind of decode a lot of weird job descriptions and, like, an awful job application process and kind of, yeah, fit yourself into, these buckets that don't really describe what you do. The the interview process is completely painful. I was lucky, but, you know, it it does involve, involve, like, a panel of people asking the exact same questions, going around the circle, right, filling in forms. And, and and honestly, in some ways, that's that's wonderful because it ensures that, all the applicants are treated equitably. There there's some benefits to that, but it's you have to like I said, you have to really want to do this. And then you look at that kind of like, this is the salary range. And to hit submit on the application knowing this is the salary range, you have to really want to do it. So in terms of the kind of the I hate to say quality, but just the type of, of the person that we have working in technology right now, it's, it's definitely not as high as it could be. And it's hard for us to, it's hard for us to recruit. So two of my coworkers, Marnie Wilhite and Ben Guin, they presented at Summit, and they had a talk that was called why would anybody want to work here. And, it was just kind of, like, given all of these, kind of given all these hurdles, how are we gonna create a culture where applicants can see our enthusiasm and the kind of environment that we're creating and and join us despite all of this? But it's a huge effort.
Part of what you talked about there was, this phrase that I heard, like, fitting yourself into buckets. And that that made me think a bit about a conversation we had, as we were again preparing for this episode. And you mentioned, having feelings of imposter syndrome creep up a bit as you've gone through your path. And I think that's something that a lot of folks in our audience can relate to a bit. What is your experience like been trying to get through those moments? And, what would you tell folks out there that are feeling similar things?
Yeah. I mean, I it's always worse when I start a job because I tend to, you know, look at the job application, fit myself into the bucket, but there's a little bit of finagling there. You know, I kind of say, oh, yeah. I mean, I I did this once. So I have lots of experience in this. And then you get into the job and you're like, oh, shit. I have to learn a lot of stuff. So those first few months, I'm always kind of struggling and kind of going home feeling like, nobody understands how how unprepared I am to do this, and I need to learn a lot. But then as you go, you kind of realize that you are not the stupid person person in the room, that everybody's kind of learning as they go. And when you start to ask questions to people, you realize that your questions are not, they might not know the answer. You know? You you sit down with an engineer and you say, I don't understand why this code isn't working. And they're kind of poking around at it for as long as you've been poking around at it and you end up googling it together and and solving the problem that way. So just seeing that pattern happen happen over and over again, is just kind of the thing I pull up in my mind when I feel, like I'm not good enough is just say, okay, like, just just think about every time you have these thoughts, you find out it's not real. So, you know, you kind of have to just talk yourself through those, through those internal dialogues.
I I guess perhaps the maybe the lesson I'm hearing from you there is none of us really know exactly what we're doing, with not it's not just you. Would that be a pretty accurate way, to describe that?
Yep. I mean, the the, you know, the technology changes so quickly. Being a strong technologist involves not being arrogant, being humble, being willing to let go of choices that you've made, being willing to ask questions, being willing to try new things. And when you're constantly trying new things, you're not gonna know everything, like, from the outset. So so, yeah, I would say the the best people I work with, we don't know what we're doing all the time.
Nice. I I I really like that answer there. I I think folks are going to, really relate to what you've said about this and, perhaps be a little better off for it, learning from that experience as well. Now these these things we've talked about here and your, experience is kinda facing that adversity in city government. One thing I noticed talking about that is that seems to relate kind of very strongly with preps things you would need to then do work to help, like, modernize services delivery. Like, you would need that that tough armor, as it were to engage in that work. So I'd like to go ahead and shift gears here, to talk a bit about your work for the city of Austin, in that realm. So in that, in your work with the city, what would you say has been the most significant challenge, that you faced as you've worked to improve services delivery?
That's that's a I mean, it's a hard question because there are so many challenges, you know, things that I found really useful and things that I perceived as challenges until, you know, I kind of learned how to deal with them was, just kind of change resistance overall, from the people on the ground. People being afraid, that they weren't going to understand a new system, that they they weren't going to have a job anymore. So really working with employees to to show them that my goal is to make their work easier, that I want them to be delivering their very valuable services to residents in a way where it's easier for them, more enjoyable for them as well as the resident. So that's that's an aspect of it is is those personal relationships with the people that you really need to be learning from and working with. But I think one of the harder ones is kind of just from, like, the kind of manager director levels up, getting them to to understand again, like, most of them aren't technologists. They're definitely not, you know, up to date on agile projects and, user centered design. So getting them to understand understand the value of user design that, like, this might seem like it's an expense you don't understand. It's not really generating, a piece of software as it goes. But the testing that you're doing ahead of time to make sure that you're actually going to build the thing that users need is really important and is gonna save you money in the long run. So in terms of the website, which is the the product that I'm working on right now, the idea that we were not going to go in a room, sit for, you know, a year, six months, and build a new website, and then all of a sudden, austintexas.gov was gonna switch off and that that morning, austin.gov was gonna switch on that instead we are going to launch an alpha site. We are gonna be testing. It was going to be obviously kind of a work in progress. It was gonna have bugs. It was gonna, you know, maybe look a little different every day. We would have to stand that up in parallel to the other site. We would work with departments to not migrate their transition their content, but, like, completely change their content. And that there is gonna be no automatic switch that was turned or that was really hard to to get people to understand and embrace. Luckily, there were, several other cities that had kind of successfully done that and ended up with really, you know, spectacular sites. So boston.gov started with, pilot.boston.gov. I think there was beta.phila.gov for Philadelphia. Mass.gov had one, indy.gov. So being able to show, to show our stakeholders, like, literally just put a slide on the wall and say, say, like, oh, this is their website when they launched it. It had three things on it and was, you know, six pages. And this is their website now. And that same site has been up the whole time. And once it had the substantial amount of content that it needed, the other site was just, you know, quietly turned off, really helped us. But that would be my hurdle, I guess.
That that makes a lot of sense, for sure. Now in in the notes that you you sent me to, you know, make sure I would be a prepared host, you made a distinction between challenges with, like, what one would assume, like, the would come with, like, the on the ground type folks and those that come from stakeholders. And they had kind of, like, a a little bit of, like, a a qualitative, statement about that relationship. Could you talk to us a bit about that?
Yeah. You know, there are you can develop trust. You can develop a relationship, with the with the staff that's working in the department if you approach it the right way. And I'm not saying always 100% of the time, but sometimes, like, a really, really important relationship where they're telling you all these things. You need to know that when you're going in to talk talk to a staff member, they you're not gonna show them everything that's new. You're not gonna solve their problem without listening to them because they've been there for a while and they probably know what the solution is, and they just haven't been empowered to implement it. So, you need to, from the outset, be showing them a lot of respect and listening a lot. And I just, you know, I have not encountered situations where where that isn't easy to do because you're you're really working on the same thing on a on a regular basis. Then once it gets up to these higher levels, there's, you know, the personalities are very different. The concerns are very different. There's a lot of politics around who owns this, who's accountable for failure, who should be lauded when there's success, these kind of more meta level of of interest. And that's a lot harder to address in a in a real genuine way. You have to put on your strategic kind of political face. And, and, you know, tell people what they wanna hear or very, very gently, convince them that you, know what you're doing. Protect your teammates from their constant scrutiny. And, you know, it it's a much different, it's a much different kind of of work to be doing.
So on on prior episodes, the I this idea of employee experience has come up as either a positive or negative influence on retention. Has this concept come up for you in either your personal experience or the experiences of those of your colleagues? And, if so, like, what what commentary would you be willing to share with us on its importance?
Yeah. For sure. I I kinda touched on this a little bit earlier when I talked about recruiting and, people really having to want to be working for the city right now in order for us to get them on board. But, the city of Austin is actually ranked as one of the top 10 employers by, like, Fortune magazine or Forbes or I don't I don't know which one it was, but it's kind of it's this hilarious list. It's like, you know, was, but it's kind of it's this hilarious list. It's like, you know, Apple, Google, Costco, City of Austin, Whole Foods. You know, it's just it's it's pretty crazy. But the city does have really great benefits. You know, it the city of Boston has a pension, then we get free PE classes. So I take free yoga classes. We get rewards for biking. I mean, there's it's a really great place to work in that sense. Unfortunately, most of the people on my team, were brought into the city as temporary employees under a fellowship program. So they don't have benefits. They, they can get start getting health benefits after a year, but they don't have any way to get paid leave, which is really important if, say, you want to have a child and and you need maternity leave to be able to, continue in that job or someone gets sick and you need to be able to leave work, for a period of time. So that has created an atmosphere on our team of, a lot of discomfort, a lot of instability. And we've had a lot of attrition lately, just because, you know, though it not being available, these full time positions that our team needs. And, again, very, very slow process of getting these employees, into full time positions. But I I think it's a pretty common, situation that technologists, designers, researchers are brought into the city on a consulting basis. So I imagine that going back to that kind of transforming HR and transforming hiring and job descriptions, making sure that there are full time job descriptions with, with security and full range of benefits, is a big part of it. Then in terms of just like the office, so it's great, it's great to work in an office with Windows. It's great to work in an office with, you know, with with fun people where you can stick stuff on the walls and wheel around whiteboards, instead of cubicles. You know, there's, a and there's a lot of employees at the city that end up in cubicles. But, you know, when we bring prospective applicants into our office and they see, you know, we're we're we're having fun and, we like where we're working. That makes an impact
too. Oh, it it definitely sounds like it. So I guess then, to that end, this is kind of, I guess, a related question, perhaps. If you had a magic wand and you could change one thing, be it about the the employee experience they were talking about or how services are delivered in the city or really kind of anything in between there, what would you use that magic wand to change?
Gosh. Okay. So in my ideal world, any resident in Austin, regardless of what language they spoke, regardless of, of their legal, status, regardless of the, you know, the device that they're using, would be able to access all of the city services that they need remotely. So they shouldn't have to go into an office. They shouldn't have to take off from work. They shouldn't have to take a bus and find childcare. They shouldn't have to figure out how to understand a web page that's not in their language. They shouldn't, have to eat up their data plan loading websites that are not performant. They shouldn't have to get someone to read them a website because it's not, ADA accessible. If everyone that's kind of my dream. If I could have a magic wand, I would be out of a job, but that would still be a wonderful situation.
A lot of areas will be in designer technology. I guess, like, if you were able to accomplish all your aims would be all about working yourself out of a job. So I guess that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. But, yeah, that seems like that'd be a great situation, for folks to be in for sure.
Yep. That's that's true. Now we we've spoken to another or sorry. There's another part of that too, that's, you know, do everything that we're we're doing open source and transparently and and, you know, even with research, creating templates for testing, creating templates for, for designing, and then being able to share that code and and that documentation with other cities who might not have the resources to have a team like ours, that's a huge part of it. So then you go from the residents in Austin have access to all these services to the residents in, you know, rural America have access to all these services.
And so that's the extension of it. So I I think that's an excellent segue into the, the next question I have for you. So you've we've spent a bit of time talking about your experiences working on, trying to get to that magic wand situation. What advice might you give to folks who are, say, in their own towns or cities and they want to do similar work and they're just getting started out?
Reach out. Like, look at who is doing what you need to do because the truth is that other other cities, other government organizations, you know, from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to the federal level organizations, we are all struggling with the same things. I think that going to the Code for America summit, is a great way to to connect and realize that. But but just have the guts to, to ask to go find the person you need to talk to who's responsible for making the thing that you admire and you want, and whether it's a digital form or, you know, a a home page that helps people navigate to the services they need. Just make friends and and help people and ask for help.
Nice. So so it sounds like, at the core of it, those that relationship building task kind of can act as as your foundation as you go forward. Am I hearing you correctly?
Yeah. For sure. So not only are you learning concrete things or, you know, finding the right, the right piece of code to use for what you're doing, but you're also, really revitalized, having these relationships where you can bet to each other, encourage each other, give each other advice.
Now another thing that, I like to do on the program, when we start to get to our conclusion is to, give the guests some time to kind of leave us with the concluding thoughts of their choice. So in that spirit, are there any concluding thoughts you wanna make sure the, audience is left with here?
Oh, gosh. Was this on your question sheet?
Oh, yes. The very bottom. I snuck it in there. Okay.
Concluding thoughts, brilliant thoughts. What we're doing is really important, and I think that we all know that it's, the civic tech movement is really, really young, or as we see it now. So everybody knows the story of kind of healthcare.gov turning into its success via, this kind of tactical scrappy approach. And that kind of spreading pretty quickly if you think about it, through government. But just know that there there's a lot of work to be done, but, but but we are doing it really fast. And we are bringing other people on board that need to be part of this, so stay hopeful. I love the code for America, you know, the stickers and the slogan, like, no one is coming. It's up to us.
Nice. I I'm a big fan of that one as well. In fact, I always have that either on a laptop or a a tablet, wherever I go. On the back of my laptop right now. Oh, nice. And, I I really enjoyed hearing hearing that conclusion from you as well. I I think the sentiment you're expressing is definitely a great thing to leave us with. So, again, Emani, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to join us. I know we've gotten to learn quite a bit both from your personal and professional experiences as well as your work to try to bring modern services to a, to the city of Austin there.
Great. Yeah. It was it was wonderful conversation. Thanks for inviting me.
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