Role:
Futurist, Product Strategist, & Product Coach
Date:
May 2019-2021
Problem
In 2018, me and my team embarked on a transformative Smart Nation journey, a visionary project aimed at leveraging emerging technology to enhance the operational efficiencies and living experience of a citizen in the nation. The overarching ambition of the Smart Nation project was multifaceted, encompassing various sectors and functionalities. However, a critical challenge emerged: the pervasive silos that existed among different government agencies. These silos were not merely organizational barriers but were deeply rooted in the disparate levels of digitization and digitalization across agencies.
The crux of the problem lay in the fragmented nature of government operations. While some agencies had embraced digital transformation, streamlining their processes and integrating seamlessly into a centralized data grid, others remained entrenched in process of getting there. These older agencies, resistant to change and lagging in digital adoption, became significant bottlenecks in the quest for a unified, connected national infrastructure. This disparity created a landscape where collaboration flourished between certain forward-thinking agencies, yet stagnation prevailed where digital integration was lagging.
How a government can become an API to transform citizen initiatives into connected smart nation experience?
Process
Central to our strategic approach was the identification of three key personas integral to understanding business incorporation ecosystem:
Government Agencies: Agencies that are the backbone of the onboarding processes, responsible for various regulatory, licensing, and compliance tasks.
Business Owners: Entrepreneurs and business proprietors seeking to establish new ventures or relocate existing ones faced numerous challenges including time consuming certification and documentation requirements.
Brokers: Acting as intermediaries, brokers played a crucial role in assisting business owners navigate the intricate onboarding landscape. They mitigated friction by handling paperwork, liaising with multiple agencies, and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
The dependency on brokers, while alleviating some immediate challenges, highlighted a systemic inefficiency that the Smart Nation initiative sought to address. The ultimate goal was to design an experience, connecting the government agency with a business owners directly where the need for broker intermediaries would be obsolete. In this endeavour, leveraging emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents (rule based basic agents at that time) to provide efficient, scalable, and cost-effective services directly to business owners was considered paramount.
Critical Note: It was an extremely large scale (national level) complex digital transformation project that impacted many stakeholders. To add to this complexity, the onset of the COVID-19 crisis presented unforeseen challenges that significantly impacted our project trajectory. The pandemic necessitated an immediate and comprehensive reevaluation of our strategies, compelling us to pivot and innovate under unprecedented circumstances.
Faced with these challenges, we returned to the drawing board to reformulate our strategy, identifying and connecting additional critical components that had not been previously considered. The below image illustrates the additional units like cashless payment systems, vaccine passports, contact tracing apps and other tools we had to integrate during this challenging phase. In the below illustration they are represented by the green bubbles. The underlying supporting components which are not represented in the illustration are remote user authentication, automated workflow adjustments, and real-time data analytics to monitor and respond to evolving needs.
Product
Here are the key stages that helped design and build a connected experience product:
Collaborative Workshops and Stakeholder Engagement:
The foundation of our product design was laid during a series of intensive workshops that I led, bringing together product owners, product managers, and technical teams from various government agencies. These workshops served as a melting pot of ideas, where diverse perspectives converged to shape a unified vision. We employed design thinking methodologies to foster creativity, encourage open dialogue, and ensure that every voice was heard.Comprehensive User Research and Persona Development:
To ensure that our solution was tailored to the needs of its end-users, we conducted extensive interviews and surveys with representatives from the three key personas: government agencies, business owners, and brokers (discussed in the previous ‘process’ section).Conceptualizing "Government as an API":
A pivotal element of our product design was the conceptualization of "Government as an API." This innovative approach envisioned the government’s services and data as modular, accessible APIs that could be integrated into a unified digital infrastructure. By treating government functions as APIs, we aimed to create a flexible and scalable backbone that could support a multitude of services and applications.
Product
Designing the Chatbot Interface with Rasa Stack:
Central to our user interface was the development of an intelligent chatbot designed to guide business owners through the onboarding process. This was a pre LLM era, so we selected the Rasa stack for its robust natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, flexibility, and open-source nature, which aligned perfectly with our technical requirements.Developing Agentic AI Vision for Inter-Agency Communication:
To emulate the functionalities of various government agencies, we envisioned an agentic process module approach to handle specific tasks such as license applications, compliance checks, and documentation processing. These process modules (pre-agents) were designed to interact seamlessly with one another, ensuring a cohesive and uninterrupted user experience even when multiple agencies were involved in a single process.Prototyping and Early Design of AI-Driven UI Screens:
Our early prototypes featured intuitive UI screens that showcased the capabilities of pre-agentic AI. The below few product design screens demonstrate how government functions could be emulated by bots (or AI agents), providing users with a familiar and efficient interface. Key features included:Search Bar Interface: Users could input natural language queries related to business incorporation, which the chatbot would interpret (dissecting intent and entities) and act upon.
Conversational Flow: The UI facilitated smooth transitions between different agency bots, ensuring that users could navigate complex processes without encountering friction.
Cross-Border Integration: Specific use cases, such as a business from Thailand seeking to incorporate in our nation, were illustrated to demonstrate how data sharing between countries could enhance the user experience.
Iterative Prototyping and Feedback Integration:
Our product design process was inherently iterative, involving multiple cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement. Each iteration incorporated feedback from end-users and key stakeholders, allowing us to enhance the functionality, usability, and reliability of the solution.
This agile approach ensured that our final product was well-aligned with user needs and capable of delivering tangible value.
Result
The culmination of our strategic efforts and meticulous product design yielded significant, measurable outcomes:
By streamlining the onboarding process through automated workflows and intelligent assistance, we observed a 7% increase in the number of businesses successfully incorporated within the pilot agencies.
User satisfaction, as measured by Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, saw a significant uplift. Business owners reported a 40% improvement in their overall satisfaction and significant reduced costs for operational purposes (payments to brokers).
The "Government as an API" framework fostered enhanced collaboration among the participating agencies. Data sharing and interoperability improved significantly, reducing redundancies, facilitated real-time information exchange, and ensured the pilot agencies operated with a unified understanding of ‘provided value’.
The implementation of advanced analytics and monitoring tools allowed us to gather comprehensive data on user interactions, process efficiencies, and system performance. These insights were invaluable in identifying areas for further optimization, enabling continuous improvement of the system.
The successful pilot laid a robust foundation for adopting future innovations and emerging technologies (like agentic AI in the 2025 world) within the Smart Nation framework.
Reflection
Reflecting on this project, I see two perspectives: the successes that make me happy today and the valuable insights I've gained into the complexities and triumphs of spearheading a Smart Nation digital transformation initiative.
Some things that I'm happy about:
From a product management perspective, coordinating and collaboration among multiple stakeholders and aligning diverse view points, needs and goals towards a common vision was both challenging and a deep learning experience. From a product designer’s perspective, I’m happy with both the output and the outcome in creating a connected user-centric solution that seamlessly integrated emerging and advanced technologies to enhance the user experience.
Here's how I'd have done it differently today:
From a product manager's viewpoint, one potential area for enhancement lies in the scalability of inter-agency collaboration. Plan to establish standardized protocols and best practices for integration from the outset could have streamlined the scaling process better. Also, a more robust change management strategy could have facilitated smoother transitions, particularly for agencies lagging in data and digitalization processes. Providing targeted adequate training, resources, and support would have accelerated product and new process adoption better.
From a product design strategist’s perspective, introducing features like machine learning-driven personalization and connecting that with predictive analytics might have enabled the system to anticipate user needs more effectively, providing proactive assistance and potentially reducing the necessity for intermediary support sooner.
LLM Disclaimer: In 2018—the pre-LLM era—"chatbot" and "conversational UI" were the dominant terms used to describe human-machine natural language interactions. I've used "LLM" in the title since the core principles of interface design remain largely unchanged. Whether we're invoking a bot, LLM, or AI agent during a task, the fundamental interaction patterns stay consistent.
Creative Confidentiality: In the spirit of professional discretion and digital camouflage, some client identities have been subtly transformed into their alter-ego personas. This ninja-like name-swapping applies exclusively to projects completed as an external design mercenary. For all other showcased works, brand and product names remain true to their original, registered identities.
Authenticity Stamp: Every pixel, wireframe, approach, and design concept you'll discover here is 100% crafted by the hands (and occasionally bulletproof caffeinated brain) of Naren Katakam. No design outsourcing, no smoke and mirrors—just pure, unadulterated creative craftsmanship.