Spotlight
Watch our Finale presentation on YouTube!
What is Spotlight?
Spotlight provides a safe space for public officers to surface the tech problems they face at work and seek solutions within the WOG community.
What motivated you to build this product?
Many officers are facing the same issues everywhere in the government but not many of them know that others also have the same problem. It typically takes a long time to address these issues at an organisational level.
What tech stack did you use?
- Langage: Typescript
- Backend: NestJS
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Frontend: ReactJS
- Frontend Components: OGP Design System
- Recurring Tasks (Such as subscription emails): Serverless
- Framework w/ AWS Lambda
- Infrastructure: AWS Elastic Beanstalk
What were the key challenges you faced in building Spotlight?
Engineering
We were using this chance to try out frameworks such as NestJS that were unfamiliar to us. Even though the product was simple, we needed some time to familiarise ourselves with the frameworks.
Design
We have no designers! PM/Engineer had to double up as designer.
What is the product vision for Spotlight?
We envision an environment like Stackoverflow where public officers actively contribute the problems and solutions to help each other in their work. In the longer term, this could also be extended to more than just WOG.
Fun facts!
One interesting finding:\
It is surprising how many officers are hesitant to speak and share the actual issues that they face in fear of being punished. On the flip side, it is also surprising that there is also a small group of public officers who are proactive in giving feedback due to their sense of duty.
One thing you’d have done differently:\
More research by speaking to users and stakeholders to find out if this tool is indeed useful for them. Many of them already have existing unofficial channels with different strengths and weaknesses.
Takeaway/learnings:\
In order to make this work - the cultural barrier has to be broken so that people are more comfortable with sharing failures, problems and things that don’t work.
