Cities and States Can Replicate NYC’s Ambitious Public Interest Tech Crew

New York City is working to answer a critical question facing cities and states: How do we put people first in a modern, digital era to fundamentally change how government operates—and what can people expect from it?

What’s most notable is the way the city is answering this question: by giving a new dedicated digital delivery team the internal support, empowerment, and structural authority to prioritize people's needs over bureaucratic processes.

That team is the NYC Public Interest Technology Crew—nicknamed “the PIT Crew.” The PIT Crew is a new government team made up of product managers, designers, engineers, user researchers and data experts to team up with City agencies to build digital solutions to thorny public problems. One of the Crew’s first projects will be to partner with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to build an online service where New Yorkers can easily file complaints against companies that place customers in hard-to-cancel, costly subscriptions.

For New Yorkers, that work is the point of government. It's also a test of whether government can reset what people expect from public services both in New York and around the country.

We've spent the last year talking to more than 100 government leaders who have delivered for people across local, state, and federal levels. We ourselves have built, led, and supported successful delivery teams around the country, including leading IRS’ Direct File. What we’ve learned is that when teams can organize around outcomes, not bureaucracy, they can truly move at the speed that government’s biggest challenges require.

New York City is looking to do this at scale. What can your city learn from the NYC PIT Crew—not just the team, but the theory of transformation? The answer lies in five principles that should become the standard operating procedure for digital capacity initiatives everywhere.

1. Set a standard that changes everything

Most government digital projects aim for incremental improvements, setting a goal of “better than last time.” That’s insufficient. The IRS Direct File showed what’s possible when you aim higher: services so intuitive, accessible, and reliable that residents come to expect government to just work.

Rather than settling for mere “improvement,” New York City—and other cities and states—should adopt aggressive user experience standards and measure success against private-sector benchmarks, not against other government agencies.

2. Organize around people’s needs, not org charts

Government is siloed by design. People don't experience government by agency. They experience it in moments: applying for a job, starting a business, navigating a health crisis. When a new parent needs childcare support, they don't care whether it's "Housing's job" or "Labor's job." They care that it works.

The most effective delivery teams organize themselves around people’s journeys. They break down silos in funding, staffing, and operations. Every state and city that wants to improve outcomes should ask: Are we organized to solve problems for residents, or for ourselves?

3. Empower teams to own outcomes end-to-end

Accountability in government is notoriously diffuse. This is where most initiatives die—not on launch day, but six months later, when the process starves what shipped. Successful digital capacity initiatives change that. A single team owns a service, is transparent about performance, and has the authority to make real changes. This requires giving teams:

• Clear responsibility for measurable outcomes
• Authority to hire, procure, and design without permission layers
• Budget control to avoid the classic government trap of funding being held hostage by competing departments

Local governments serious about scaling impact should pilot this model in one high-impact service and measure results after 90 days.

4. Move to outcomes-based everything

This is where most digital initiatives fail: they build something beautiful and then get strangled by traditional government processes. Budget cycles, hiring freezes, and procurement bureaucracy can kill momentum faster than any technical failure.

The answer is straightforward in theory, hard in practice: apply agile, outcomes-driven approaches to everything—hiring, procurement, budgeting and policy approval. New York City's commitment to this approach through its Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) is encouraging. Other governments should move faster in this direction.

5. Build openly and aim for replicability

When government solves a problem well, it should share the solution. Open-source code, reusable service components, documented playbooks—one city's solution becomes every city's starting point. One city shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel when another has already built it.

Governments should compete on outcomes, not on proprietary approaches. The team that figures out how to streamline unemployment benefits should publish that playbook. The agency that builds accessible design systems should share them.

The real test

The launch of the New York City PIT Crew is encouraging because it signals that leadership understands what’s needed: in-house talent, organizational authority, and political cover. That’s rare. Most governments talk about “innovation” while structurally making it impossible.

But the launch of a team isn't success—delivery is. And delivery at scale requires the principles above.

The opportunity in front of governors, mayors, and city administrators is clear: Don't wait to see if New York City's model works. Begin building your own version now, before a disaster strikes and you need your own PIT crew to clean it up. Organize a team around the highest-impact resident experience problem in your area. Give them authority. Measure relentlessly. Share what you learn.

People in other states and cities shouldn't have to wait for their government to deliver what New Yorkers will soon expect as standard. That gap—between what's possible and what's normal—is where innovation lives.

It's now up to other governments around the country to close it.