Stephanie Kaiser: Change through delivery – A strategy for transformation in the complex German system

Stephanie Kaiser: Good afternoon and welcome. Hello from my side. I must first say I’m really impressed of people gathering on this topic of putting user needs first and bringing all your energy and openness to an event like this. Really sharing your learnings to be able to actually learn from each other. I really love that and for once I don’t feel alone in the wide ocean of government innovation and that That feels really good. Today Magdalena was actually supposed to stand here but she cannot be here unfortunately. So I got asked to finish off your day and I’m actually very humbled and honored to do that. My name is Stephanie. I’m Chief Product Officer of Digital Service and I’m a product person at heart. I have been building for the past 20 years products and organizations, mostly in the private sector. For the last two times I was speaking in Amsterdam, I was actually speaking about building games and the organizations around that. In 2018 I was asked to work in the Digital Council of Chancellor Merkel and through that work I fell in love with government innovation. So the product person I am, or being a true product person, I had to choose the biggest problem as you just laid out. So for today I got asked to talk about the role of digital service within the German government and how we tackle the ongoing challenge of delivering user-centric digital services in a complex and decentralized landscape that Germany is. And our very short answer, and that’s a glimpse into my talk, is change through delivery. That’s our underlying principle. But maybe first up, what is digital service? Digital Service is an almost five-year-old government-owned company and when founding the company the goal was to create a place for digital talent like you are from the private sector, a place where people actually want to work for the state and with the state to ultimately create a digital state from its own strength. It all started with a non-profit startup that was offering fellowships, Tech and Work for Germany it was called. And they were bringing in digital expertise and talents into the ministries to work with people within the ministries for a certain amount of time on their projects. This startup got acquired by the state and the goal of that new company was to build software within interdisciplinary teams. First located in the Chancellor’s office in 2022 we were moved to the Ministry of the the interior. And by now we are 200 fantastic people in different projects working with different ministries on developing digital products, but also working on levers for better government innovation and still offering the fellowship work for Germany. Now that all sounds nice, but still five years into this whole thing, if you were in Germany in a room like that every single person of you would have a shitty story when interacting with the administration in Germany. So what’s the problem we are trying to solve? This is a magic number in Germany. We have 16 countries, federal states they are called. So that’s 16 times being responsible for digital, for running digital services, for building digital services. That’s also for example 16 times being responsible for paying out benefits. It’s distributed across 16 federal countries. Another problem is, I know, but I need my notes. Another problem is the ecosystem. And this looks like a joke actually, but it’s the ecosystem of digitalization in Germany. What you can see here is a historically grown and really not organized map of all the actors that are in the field. So you have state actors, you have the countries, you have in-house units and many, many more units. There simply is no centralized authority such as the governmental digital service in the UK. And what’s the result of that as a citizen? And in the previous talk, somebody said, we are the citizens actually. So I will tell one story. I had to renew or I had to get a new ID because I lost my ID. So I went to the citizen’s office. And you need a photo for that. I didn’t have a photo. But lucky me, in the office, there was a photo booth. And it didn’t take card payment. But lucky enough, it took– it seemed it would take bills and coins. So I tried my bill. Didn’t work. Then I thought, well, I will try to use my coins just to see if it works, because I didn’t have enough coins. But I wanted to see if it works at all. So I put my coins in. Then I saw a progress bar, which was really surprising. And then I wasn’t fast enough, because I don’t know, it didn’t compute. The progress bar went down. The machine ate my coins. So now I’m just with my bill. Then I had to run to 10 shops to break my bill down into the coins, run back to the photo booth, put my coins in, and then the best part happened. I was confronted with a very, very difficult task. I had to choose the language, and the screen looked like this. (Laughter) And there you see the progress bar, famous progress bar. So I was fast because I thought, “Oh my God, if I’m not answering this, then my money will be gone again.” Now, to me, this is actually a metaphor to what sometimes it feels like in Germany to interact with a state. Sometimes, there are some examples that are better. And this is a funny story you all loved. I think in hindsight, it’s very funny. I got my ID in the end and I was happy, but I think it shows in numbers. You can see it here. This is a chart showing the cost of administration going up since many, many years. And this is not only a problem of cost, to be honest, it’s a problem for all involved people that kind of want to interact with state systems. Yesterday, Martin and Cara talked about efficiency and why efficiency is actually important. And I completely agree, this is not the Doge kind of efficiency, but we have to say that now. This is about people that today have shitty experiences on all ends of governmental services, not only citizens, but also people working within the administration and within the justice system. So my role is not to whine. I’m not here to whine. I’m here to talk about what are we actually doing to change this in a complex surrounding. Our goal is to enable digital services to work better for everyone. And with that, I mean citizens, but also people within the administration and within the justice system. And ultimately, actually the goal is people using their time in an efficient and meaningful way. Now, what exactly are we doing? I was talking about change through delivery in the very beginning as an underlying principle of our work. Here you can see there is this small, oh, actually you don’t see it, but on the left side, you can see there is a circle of control. That’s what we can influence. That’s where we can actually work, where we have our control. So we start by delivering products by executing on those. And through that, the more we deliver locally, instead of writing another paper, the more we act, hopefully, as an inspiration for a broader change in the system, which here is the circle of influence. Now to give you an example in the field of taxes, in 2020, no, yeah, 2020, Corona year, we developed a prototype for a tax guide for pensioners in cooperation with the Ministry of Finance. Later that year, because we did that, we delivered on that. We were asked to build a usable product for all 16 states of that initial prototype. Since that was successful, then we were asked to build a solution to hand in your property tax law. Sorry, to hand in your property tax. And we did that. And we did that in a small team of seven people for seven months. And I think this is a very good example of how we actually work and what are kind of our ways of working. And they are, to go through them, we work in a user-centred way, In an iterative way, we work in interdisciplinary teams and we work in the open. Why do we do that? So with user-centered, we mean we validate assumptions early and continuously with qualitative and quantitative data to face reality early. So what you can see here is actually Anna standing in front of the main station in Berlin, testing some names for an app that we were developing at the time. Then also we work in short development cycles to actually be able to implement those changes based on the learnings that we got. And we publish deliberately MVPs, like minimum viable products, to understand where people fail and where they fail to use our service and improve these step by step. We work in interdisciplinary teams. What does that mean? together all the disciplines that are needed to build those services such as design, user research, product management, engineering and one more discipline that we call transformation management. Maybe for the lack of better words, I don’t know, but they are the ones that are translating the ways of working within our organization to the ministries that we are working with. And I just drink some water. And then we work in the open because we really believe we can only work from the community such as this. We blog, we speak, we share, we publish our source codes, for example on GitHub, because we want to make transparent on what we are working, while we are working on it, and we always work with an open mind. As a result, almost 1 million tax law declarations were handed in through our service. It took people 15 to 30 minutes to actually hand those in. That sounds nice too. That was a good basis to start with. However, we realized through working on the softwares we were working on that we only scratched the surface. Now this image tries to explain a little bit what I mean by that. On the left hand side you can see what citizens actually experience when they have something to do with the administration. It’s the interfaces that we designed. For example the interface for declaring your property tax. However the work that ministries do is on the right side. And that is laws and regulations. And what we realized throughout our work on the software, that those parts are heavily disconnected. So if we build software, digital interfaces based on tricky processes or even worse based on non-digital ready laws, then we have a problem. Because then really the interfaces that we have simply don’t do the job. But if an underlying legislation is digital ready, for example if it allows to reuse data, to automate stuff or if it demands end-to-end digital processes, only then we can build the best services for our citizens. Also for me. Because really in the end the best service that we can provide is the one that we don’t have to touch anymore. And in the case of property tax, that would have been that the state is actually able to reuse data that is already there instead of outsourcing something, typing in data, to the biggest source of error running around, which is us, because we make mistakes when we type in this data. So together with the Ministry of the Interior, we started working on a project called DigitalCheck. Iteratively and together with the ones working on laws and regulations, in Germany we created a set of tools and methods to help creating digital ready law. But we didn’t do this alone. In fact we were borrowing ideas in the very beginning from the Danish government because they also worked on principles for digital ready law. Now those principles, I have them on my computer. They are a common kind of vocabulary to make it even possible to talk about digital ready legislation and what it means across hierarchies and roles within government and services like us. And then the power of community even went further. Seeing the UK colleagues actually publishing their principles, we realized that that was almost like a literal translation of what we have done. That’s pretty cool. I’m happy about this. Now, since the beginning of 2023, all laws that are being written in Germany have to do the digital check. And ever since, we have been iteratively working on improving the methods that we have developed together with the people actually writing the laws. And we realized that a missing piece is also bringing in the competence that we have, for example, at digital service, into the lawmaking processes. You have another 10 seconds to think about what I just said. All right, so to give you an example, we helped the ones writing, and I have to read this out because it’s really difficult, the German Electricity Duty Act with a small interdisciplinary team of a designer, an engineer and a product person. We brought the legislators into practice and we showed them how their law at the moment is actually currently being converted into processes in practice today. And this confrontation with reality and then working through visualizations and actually iterating on their law that they were writing, we reached our goal and we helped them to come up with a law that in the end was digital ready and it included the possibility of automation the reuse of data and the end-to-end digital processes. By that, and I’m very happy about this result because it’s always very tricky to measure why user-centricity is so important, 15.5 million euros are now being saved every single year in actually implementing the law. That’s great. Now another example of change through delivery for us is in the field of justice. You have maybe heard Paul and Marlene talk about our justice services today, so I won’t go into the detail too much, but I will focus on the aspect of collaboration. In 2021 we got approached by the Ministry of Justice asking us to build a chatbot for them. And we said, no, we are not going to do that, but we are happy to discuss the problem that to solve and then we can see if we can help you. Now you remember the 16, the really huge 16 on screen. Justice is a field where the responsibility does not lay on the federal level but it is with the countries. Now the Ministry of Justice actually wanted to work on a nationwide standardized service and we were happy to take the task. However how would we actually motivate the countries to accept a nationwide service, if in the end it’s still them being responsible. For that the fantastic team of those projects came up with what we call the onion of collaboration. At the core of this onion you can see digital service working together with the Ministry of Justice on the actual product. Now the next layer describes the work with our partner countries, so that’s the countries in Germany. And with them we discuss frequently overarching topics and needs. Now the outer layer is the layer of our pilot courts where we work in a user-centric way as I just laid out to you. And then we have expert groups that help us here and there with very specific questions. Through that we were able to recruit 31 pilot courts and we are happy to work with them. We visit them, we understand their work processes and we test our solutions with them. And I am really impressed by the ambition and openness we meet on a daily basis. By that we hope to make sure that in the end everyone will use the service nationwide. As a result, now after three years of working in those projects, just last week the countries, there is an e-justice council and that’s where all the countries come together. And those countries, they published a cross-state strategy. I will say that again because it’s so special to us. A cross-state strategy for the digitalization of the justice system. mentioning the goal of building nationwide services. You can see I’m excited about this. So that’s really a step. So now aside from building software, from working on digital legislation and developing ways of collaboration with countries, we also change for delivery. I have two more examples of change for delivery for you in two aspects. and accessibility. The first one is a standard. It’s called service standard and it was developed by the Ministry of the Interior and it describes contemporary ways of working. It’s actually fantastic to be honest. It talks about user centeredness, it talks about iterative and data-driven development, it talks about open source, open standards, security by design. Now it’s there but nobody really is using it, developing government services. It’s not mandatory. So change through delivery, we started using it. And how do we use this? You can see that on that picture. For example, we run critical yet friendly peer reviews on new services and development. And then the peers write lovely 20 page reports where the team has done well, what the next step of the team could be. And we also transparently publish those, so everyone can read them. Now through this delivery, we widened our circle of control and we were asked to iterate the service standard. After five years, it finally gets an update. And just last year, throughout the process of three months, 41 public and private sector organizations have worked to write an improved version of the standard that is now published. And then, one last example that we built on our own. Again here, we were deeply inspired by the community. Borrowing from the UK’s Department for Education, we have developed tools for awareness raising for ourselves. So for last year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we built a small tool called “Wie viele Menschen?” of a lack of accessibility and how many people it actually affects. And this is what it looks like. You type in a number and then the number of people that use your service. And then based on public statistics you will be shown how many users of your service may have a disability, an impairment or other characteristic to be taken into account. And one last thing. In addition to that, we have developed a software tool that helps us to use accessibility personas even faster for Google Chrome to quickly switch between personas and assistive tech. And this promotes routine in our teams. So change for delivery also works for us. Now to sum this up, I hope I have given you an idea of how we are working and how we are trying to step by step and with incremental changes. We are widening the circle of our control and how we are trying to influence the bigger circle. I think I said it already. We have a fantastic team of 200 people and I’m actually in awe because the sounds and talks always so shiny and nice but it’s a tedious task to actually stand up every day and tackle this topic. And if you ask me today, what is the role of digital service in Germany’s government, in today’s German government, I actually have to say I have no clue. Because just yesterday, the elected parties published their coalition agreement, and they are in the process of forming a new government. One of the big news is that There will be a new ministry for digitalization and state modernization. This ministry hasn’t been there before. Within the next week, the new government will be formed and they will take up their work. Most probably we will move to this ministry or not. I don’t know. But being a chronic optimist, I’m pretty sure that If we keep delivering and learning from communities such as this, I’m sure my kids will have a better experience when interacting with the German state. I thank you very much, I know it’s late, for hearing me out and I’m very much looking forward to learning from you. 

Jeroen Schalk: Thank you for listening to this audio recording. This keynote was delivered at the User Needs First International Conference 2025 in Amsterdam. You can find all about this conference on gebruikercentraal.nl/recap2025. Don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast through Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your other podcast app of choice. You want to learn more about the User Needs First community? Check out international.gebruikercentraal.nl or for our Dutch listeners gebruikerscentraal.nl. Till next time!