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Head of Product Policy

  • Hybrid
    • Singapore, Central Singapore, Singapore
  • Policy

Job description

Who We Are

Open Government Products (OGP) operates like a startup within the government; We are a fast-paced, dynamic team of engineers, designers, and product managers dedicated to public good. We autonomously identify opportunities to solve public problems using tech, rapidly prototype, and launch solutions—from citizen apps to automating public agency operations. Embracing an open-sourced and flat hierarchy, we cut through bureaucracy to focus on real-world, user-centric innovations that drive change.

You’re tired of traditional policy work

You’ve had to navigate long clearance chains, repeated rounds of review and watch as the policies you’ve worked on get diluted with every single additional meeting. We do things differently at OGP.

Product Policy officers are given end-to-end ownership of a problem. That means engaging directly with citizens to understand their concerns, working with OGP product teams to improve product features and convincing senior public servants on the best course of action - usually all in one day.

You will not be waiting around asking your director for clearance, you’re expected to solve problems as they crop up. You won’t be evaluated based on the polish of your decks, your work is judged by how much it improves outcomes for citizens.

Key Responsibilities

  • Embed with one or more OGP product teams as their day-to-day Product Policy point person: in the stand-ups, in the roadmap, in the room

  • Identify problems on the ground, then write the policy that solves them at a whole-of-government (WOG) level at MDDI. This is so the fix outlasts your one team and one programme

  • Co-write policy directly with agency business owners, so the policy and the product both come out better

  • Own the agency relationship for your team: build trust, advance public interest, unblock it when it's stuck, escalate only when it genuinely needs a bigger hammer

  • Sense-check whether governance, tech policy, and transformation efforts are actually landing, and flag it early, before it's a paper problem or a public one

  • Build real technical fluency in how your product actually gets built, not from a deck, but from the people building it

  • Feed what you're seeing on the ground back to OGP leadership — you're often the first to know when something's off

  • [For Leads and above] Mentor and set the standard for more junior officers working alongside you

Who this is for

  • You must have done policy work in the Singapore public service for at least 8 years, including leading teams.

  • You've built or materially grown a team or function you had a hand in shaping, not one handed to you finished.

  • You are technical already, or willing to become so. You'll be able to explain the architecture of the products your team supports, and hold your own with engineers.

  • You're comfortable at both ends: you understand the problem from the ground up, and you can take a position with Chief Executives (CEs), Permanent Secretaries (PSes), and Political Office Holders (POHs) and have it stick.

  • You don't lead from a distance. When a problem is stuck, you can roll up your sleeves and do the work alongside your officers, and you're as comfortable doing it as directing it.

  • You have led people through changes and you are not afraid to have difficult conversations when necessary.

  • You want to see your work directly bring about measurable positive public impact, and you're tired of watching good ideas die in the gap between policy and implementation

What you’ll do

  • Build and lead the team. You'll grow a team of ~10 policy officers, hire and develop them, and decide where they embed and when to pull them out.

  • Make them technical. You'll grow your officers' technical fluency deliberately, so they leave with real skills and not just relationship management.

  • Set OGP's Product Policy strategy. You'll decide our position on legislative engagement, cross-ministry positioning and governance standard-setting.

  • Be OGP's voice to senior government. You'll show CEs, PSes and ministers' offices how technology can improve citizens' lives, and take positions at whole-of-government (WOG) level at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI).

  • Own the hard calls. You'll decide which problems policy takes on, set the standard for what good looks like, and step in yourself when a case is stuck.

  • Stay in the work. You'll carry live problems yourself, from embedding with a product team to co-writing policy with an agency, alongside your officers and not just reviewing their output.

  • Lead partner agency transformation. You’ll conceptualise, secure buy-in, and pilot transformation models in our partner agencies, and deploy officers to drive the execution.

We do actually work this way

Two things we'd point at rather than describe:

  • *ERP X.** We thought road pricing could be done better, so we built an alternative and tested it. Then we published what we tried, what worked, what didn't, and why we think this is a better way for government to build.

  • *Our AMA on r/singapore.** We sat in front of the public and answered questions about our own strengths and weaknesses, unfiltered.

Neither was a communications exercise. Both reflect a willingness to test ideas openly and share the results, including where they fell short. This approach won't suit everyone, and that's a reasonable basis for deciding whether the role is a good fit.

An overview of other OGP products can be found on our website https://open.gov.sg.

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I hereby give my consent to Open Government Products, Government Technology Agency (“OGP”) to: Obtain and verify information from or with any source (including third parties) as may be deemed appropriate by OGP and/or any relevant Government agency for the purposes of assessing my application for employment and/or for recommendation to a third party for employment with or engagement by that third party (see below for more information). Share my personal data set out in this application form and any other personal data subsequently provided by me arising out of or in connection with my application for employment with other Government agencies or a third party vendor appointed by OGP for the purposes of recruitment and/or review of recruitment practices, and for such personal data to also be used as part of de-identified and aggregated data for reporting purposes.  

Additionally, where relevant, OGP may share my personal data set out in this application form and any other personal data subsequently provided by me to a third party for that third party to consider employing or otherwise engaging me to undertake work relevant to OGP. I understand and acknowledge that the collection, use and/or disclosure of such personal data may also be subject to that third party’s privacy terms. I declare that all the information given by me is true to the best of my knowledge and voluntarily given.   By clicking the 'Apply' button, I hereby certify that I have read and understood all of the clauses above and that I agree to all of them.