The TTS Public Benefits Studio

The TTS Public Benefits Studio is a new team that will focus on building and scaling software products that radically improve public benefits delivery across benefits programs.

The Studio will fill a current gap at TTS by occupying the space between exploring early-stage ideas and operating established, production systems.

Organizationally, it will be part of TTS Solutions.

What kind of products are you going to build?

We aren’t 100% sure where the studio will place its first bets, but we have some ideas, based upon:

• Expanding products we’ve built with partners to other agencies
• Building products we’ve prototyped but couldn’t find owners for
• Identifying cross-agency opportunities with existing momentum based on partners talking with each other

And more specifically:

• Eligibility determination tools (ex. income verification, tools and services to find benefits, business rules as code) - making the eligibility process more transparent, business rules easier to update, connecting existing data sets to aid in determination
• Unified search / status UI / case management - looking across legacy databases to identify cases and make data more accessible and actionable for case workers and beneficiaries. This also serves as an effective first step into legacy modernization.
• Funding request processes - similar to eAPD - that focus on improving the funding request process by using technology to help funding agencies and requesters focus on outcomes and important information rather than manually calculating finances and searching for project details in long docs

BUT – this is just a start. There are many other service/product offerings that we could explore - a longer treatment of this subject is here🔒.

AND – We need ideas from people with experience working in this space and people with lived experience using these services and benefits. We will be using the "Studio coworking" time on Wednesdays at 1pm ET as a forum and shared thinking space for TTS folks who want to contribute and help shape potential product ideas and problem areas.

Who is going to do this work?

This is a product studio, so we know we are going to need people to build products – cross functional teams of product, strategy, design, infrastructure design and support, engineering.

And to be successful in this complicated space we’ll also need folks with domain expertise and who can be responsible for tracking policy, legislative sentiment, and agency needs.

We’ll probably need some managers too…

We aren’t sure yet who those individuals will be. The 18F Public Benefits team has been working to shape and steward this concept to this point. From here @alexpandel, @amyashida, & @fedrampashley are serving as the team to help build the team.

How can I help? How will hiring and staffing work?

We are working on the details. But, we do know that we intend for the process to be fair, equitable, and transparent. Alex, Amy, and Ashley are working closely with TTS leadership to make sure we get this right.

In the meantime, we want everyone who wants to be involved to be involved. There is a great range of experience and perspective across TTS that we want the future Studio team to benefit from. Here are a few ways you can get involved now:

• Join the conversations in #benefits-studio on the TTS Slack
• The Public Benefits Studio coworking sessions on Wednesdays at 1pm ET will be used as forums for conversations and co-working time.
• Send one of us a message, we can talk about ways to get involved

Running list of open questions

• Are program agencies going to be willing to use products that are owned by TTS? Are they going to trust our products to be reliable for mission-critical functions?
• How are we going to avoid just being a "pilot factory" hunting around for pilot partners? How are we planning to deeply partner with program agencies from day one?