Building modern paid family and medical leave programs
Helena Lopes via Nava
COMMENTARY | How agile development, human-centered design and an API-first strategy drive success to ensure software always aligns with user needs.
For many workers, paid family and medical leave benefits can be a lifeline during major life events such as welcoming a new child or caring for a sick family member. PFML programs can also benefit the economy by closing earnings gaps and increasing workforce retention and participation.
However, it can be challenging for states to build modern, effective PFML programs due to the time pressure of legislative deadlines, legacy technology constraints, or unfamiliarity with potential beneficiaries’ nuanced needs.
To build on highly reliable, adaptable and resilient program infrastructure, states should leverage agile development, API-first strategies and human-centered design. These best practices ensure that working software always aligns with user needs, even as those needs evolve over time.
Agile development is the process of building and rolling out software in small pieces, testing or gathering feedback from real people, and iterating frequently. This methodology drastically reduces the risk and costs associated with standing up a new program.
It’s wise to consider the fastest, cheapest way possible to test a potential solution. This enables teams to test ideas, prototypes and minimum viable products with real people. It also helps validate or invalidate a team’s assumptions and hypotheses on how to meet people’s needs.
When testing ideas, it’s key to engage stakeholders early and often to promote continuous improvement. The practice of building unified, clear and respectful products and services that incorporate continuous feedback from the people you are designing for is called human-centered design.
When paired with agile development, human-centered design increases the likelihood a program or service will truly meet peoples’ needs.
For example, human-centered design can help program implementers improve accessibility by simplifying and clarifying eligibility requirements. Designing with the people who will be impacted by the service can also help the program effectively address more complicated situations, such as a worker taking leave from multiple employers.
This doesn’t only benefit the public; it also helps governments build and implement programs more cost effectively. That’s because meeting people’s needs with confidence helps avoid expensive rework and is the best way to deliver high stakes programs on time and on budget.
In the case of PFML, practicing human-centered design might mean interviewing potential applicants, conducting usability testing with community organizations, or observing how government staff interact with a prototype.
The latter is especially important, as government staff can help teams understand a program’s internal processes — an essential step in improving efficiency and scalability. Once a team has gathered feedback, it’s crucial that they use those findings to iterate, test again, then rinse and repeat.
The key to maximizing the benefits of human-centered design and agile development is adopting an API-first strategy. APIs are mechanisms that enable two technical systems to communicate. Organizations that build infrastructure with an API-first mindset create a solid foundation to scale the program over time.
This means that APIs should not be an afterthought or used only for application logic; teams should leverage APIs early in the development process when they’re establishing the technical and operational architecture of the service or program.
Adopting API-first infrastructure has numerous advantages. It allows for loose coupling between system components, enabling teams to test changes to one component without unpredictable or cascading changes to the rest of the system. This is crucial to quickly iterating on modular components and launching new features as people’s needs grow and evolve.
API infrastructure can also help reduce administrative burden for applicants and agency staff. Benefit programs often use the same information to determine eligibility factors like income, but when agencies can’t share this information with one another, applicants must re-verify their data to receive multiple benefits.
APIs can streamline how agencies share data with one another, helping applicants spend less time re-verifying data and reducing the risk of errors that agency staff will need to address. Sharing data between public benefit agencies in New Mexico helped increase participation in the state’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program by 18%.
Finally, API-first infrastructure enables agencies to amend or replace systems without affecting integrations with other systems. This is still important for agencies building new programs, because the public’s needs may evolve years or decades down the line. For instance, a state PFML agency leveraging API-first infrastructure can more easily replace their underlying claims processing system without affecting how data passes from the frontend of their claimant portal to backends that store claimant data.
Conversely, an agency that does not leverage an API-first strategy might struggle to adapt to the public’s changing needs. Such a system would become more complex and unwieldy as the agency adds new features or functionality, leading to slower delivery, reduced iteration frequency, and an organizational culture that could be increasingly averse to change.
Standing up a new PFML program is no small feat, but with the right tools and methodologies, state PFML agencies can launch successful, modern services and programs that make a big difference in workers’ lives.
Leveraging an API-first strategy in concert with agile development and human-centered design can reduce administrative burden for constituents and agency staff, promote continuous improvement, and provide agencies with valuable data on how well systems are serving the public. All of this contributes to systems that are modular, resilient, and future-proof. Time after time, we’ve seen states succeed by adopting these best practices.
Rohan Bhobe is CEO of Nava PBC, a public benefit corporation focused on making government services simple and effective. Nava has partnered with three states to design, build, operate and enhance PFML programs.