GovTech Barbados
A national digital service, built to last
When I arrived in February 2025, GovTech Barbados was one person: the chief executive, running the organisation single-handedly. I built it into the Government of Barbados’s digital service alongside a brilliant team from Public Digital. Eighteen months later it was thirty people.
Ship early, learn from real use
The bet was to digitise quickly and learn from real use, because even a plain online form beats posting paper or queuing to hand it in. We started with the forms, grouped them, then built them into services, on a roadmap everyone could see. Alpha.gov.bb went live in October 2025.
Build the team where the work is
We hired in Barbados and grew the team while it shipped, mixing people who knew how to deliver services for government with Barbadians who were new to it.
Make AI how the work gets done
AI went into how the work got done, rather than into a pilot on the side. Standards and house style were written as skills built into the tools the team already used, so the right thing was the easy thing.
By June 2026, 72% of the team’s commits were made with AI, up from none six months earlier.
Leave it running
What we handed over was capability at national level: a country able to build and run its own digital services, not a document describing how. The handover was a set of skills the team could run without us.
A month after I left, over half the team’s commits were still made with AI.