Writing
Building the team at GovTech Barbados
One of the big things about helping to set up GovTech Barbados was building capability in digital government for Barbados. Not just services: capability, in Barbados, for Barbados.
We were trying to do two things:
- build capability by working hybrid and alongside the Barbadian team
- build a national digital platform
We built a hybrid team
People who had worked together before, and people from Barbados. We hired the initial team before we delivered anything, then started hiring more people. New developers were committing to the platform within days of joining. We were operating like a startup, not a government.
That was the vision. We wanted to go fast.
Some of us had spent years in government digital teams. We could talk in shorthand — words like Alpha, standing in for a whole mindset and way of working. It made us quick with each other. But I worry that we didn’t explain that enough to our Barbadian colleagues.
The people we hired in Barbados built services, did user research, wrote content, wrote code. They sat with the people these services are for, and came back with what worked and what didn’t.
We built a national digital platform
Services went out as the team grew. The platform and the capability came together, each one paying for the other: delivering gave people something real to learn on, and the people we were building up were the ones delivering it.
Two things I’d change
Often we were moving so fast it was hard to keep people abreast of everything going on.
When you’re building a new organisation for a government, even using tried and tested techniques as we were, there’s a lot of pressure to show results quickly.
If I could go back I’d spend more time talking about the why more clearly.
I’d also build more space for learning for the people who need it, often I felt like people were being thrown in at the deep end. That’s not often good for learning new things.
Do both, with room to learn
You can deliver quickly, quicker now with AI. Capability is the slower half: messy and human. Doing both at once is still the right answer — it is the only way the people who stay are the people who built it. It’s the thing that gives people in an organisation air cover to learn and develop.
Eighteen months on there is a platform, and a team in Barbados running it — and they are still shipping things.
Next post: the strategy. Forms first, then groups, then services.