18F Blog

Ask 18F is an advice column that answers questions sent in by federal employees. In this edition, two of our enginners share how to best advocate for the addition of open-source tools in the analytics space.

While our consulting work serves the needs of a particular customer, managing one of our products means we are responsible for a shared service used by many of our partners. Managing one of the products and platforms means thinking beyond any individual customer. This work requires that we constantly evaluate market needs, ensure the product matches those needs, and support the business side of product management.

In the previous post, we wrote about how product management works in Path Analysis and Experiment & Iterate phases. In this post, we’ll discuss how 18F product managers support our partner agencies who are procuring the services of industry contractors to help achieve their mission.

At 18F, we partner with federal agencies to improve the user experience of government. We bring our product management skills to bear during these engagements to build digital services in line with our partners’ missions. When working with an agency, identifying the right problem focus on is often the first challenge. That’s why we have Path Analyses (PA): short engagements to survey the landscape and align everyone on a path forward.

This is the second in a two-part series exploring the basics of running a remote moderated usability test. In part one, we explored usability testing at a high level: what it is and why it’s important. In this post we’ll review a five-step process for conducting your first round of tests