Experts recommend using TMF to focus on product — not project — delivery

The Technology Modernization Fund has frequently been praised for its ability to solve one problem for agencies: access to multi-year funding when most budget allocations are set for a single fiscal year. 

But the revolving fund housed at the General Services Administration also has the potential to spread better technology practices across the government, a group of civic tech and government IT stakeholders argue in a “Day One” memo published by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Federation of American Scientists.

The government needs to move from using project management — which focuses on following a set plan — to product management — which focuses on meeting the needs of users — for its technology, they wrote, and the TMF can be a leverage point to do that. 

“I don’t think that the people who created the TMF meant to lock us into a narrow definition of modernization, but I think that lots of people heard that,” said Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at FAS, as well as the founder of Code for America and a former U.S. deputy chief technology officer. She offered the example of shifting a mainframe system to the cloud without any changes.

“Digital transformation is different from modernization,” she said. “Transformation, where I would prefer to use the word product management, is saying, ‘Let's actually start with the need and build something that meets the need instead of recreating or replicating what existed before.’”

The memo — written by Pahlka alongside Ben Bain, director of state capacity at the Niskanen Center; Beth Simone Noveck, New Jersey’s chief AI strategist; and Lynn Overmann, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Beeck Center — is centered on the potential of the TMF as a leverage point to advance product management capacity in government.

Those managing the TMF do some product management already, said Bain, but the group behind the memo wants the TMF to go even further and drive momentum for these practices across government. 

“The TMF should shift from investments in high-cost, static technologies that will not evolve to meet future needs towards supporting the development of product model capabilities within agencies,” the memo said. 

The memo’s authors recommended that the TMF train agencies to adopt the product model; evaluate investments based on their use of product management, not cost savings alone; and fund the necessary staff as part of a “capabilities-first mindset” to build internal capacity at agencies.

Software would need to be purchased in a way that it can evolve over time to meet changing needs, and agencies would need “enough internal talent to get the outsourcing right, such that the government staff own the product vision,” said Pahlka. 

Agencies would require product managers, user researchers and service designers to do things like discovery sprints and user research, and funding would need to support the ability to go one step at a time instead of locking into a mega-project.

“This approach is ultimately more cost effective, results in continuously updated and effective software, and better meets user needs,” the memo stated.

Whether the incoming Trump administration takes this route remains to be seen. 

“I think if there’s a champion within the administration that steps up and sees the value of leveraging tools like TMF and [U.S. Digital Service] and 18F to improve service delivery, I think there are opportunities to move forward,” said Overmann. “That champion emerged and was quite useful in the first term, and I don't think we know who or if that champion will step forward.”

Anyone interested in new ideas, however, can look at several FAS Day One policy memos focused on government capacity for talent, procurement, modernization and more. GSA’s early-career fellowship program, the U.S. Digital Corps, was first a FAS policy memo in 2020 before the Biden administration launched the program in 2021. 

If it is truly interested in pushing product management, GSA could start now. The agency announced two new investments totaling about $20 million on Tuesday. 

The Office of Personnel Management will be using $18.3 million to modernize legacy federal retirement systems, and the Justice Department is putting $1.34 million into the modernization of its legacy core management system and backend databases.