First drop: April 3rd
Over the past few years, we've spent a lot of time inside complicated workforce problems and day-to-day workflows on the ground. As a product-lady, worker-facing-tools nerd, former science teacher, and systems nut, that's really fun.
A few things come up often when trying to connect people to opportunities within the workforce tech world. Unsexy things like… labor market opportunities in one system but not another, sloppy crosswalks, "garbage data," "standardization," legacy workflows, ballooning SaaS budgets, etc, etc, etc. The type of stuff that steals a heroic program officer away from delivering the programming and people work that really moves the needle. (Hi, we love you. Thank you.)
Most of the time, solving even small issues requires time, funding, and coordination across multiple systems. So the workarounds stick around longer than they should and get wonkier and wonkier. Or new opportunities arrive and have to be adopted at a snail's pace.
Over the last eight years, working across systems that have reached more than three million workers, we've picked up a lot of small, specific lessons about what actually slows people down. It is our greatest hope that WhereWeGo Labs may be a way to put those lessons to use more consistently, without waiting for the major grant or huge budget faucet. As more and more nonprofits and industries face more and more uncertainty, I like the idea of making it easier for them to try new things, and since we can't predict the future anyway, let's build a lot, out in the open, for free, for fun, with the workforce champions we hold so dear.
What is WhereWeGo Labs?
We'll launch at least one product just for workforce ecosystem folks every 30 days. Here are the specs:
- Each tool is based on a specific issue we've seen in practice.
- Someone has asked for it.
- The tools will be free and public.
- We'll kill the bad ones.
Some will be useful right away. Some will need iteration. Some may not get used much at all. What matters is getting something concrete into people's hands and learning, alongside one another, in this strange, new world we find ourselves in.
Why we're doing this
The tools we have now make it possible to stay close to a problem from conversation to build, sometimes in the same day. Our product people have become devs and our devs have become product people and all of us have our ears open for "what stubborn workforce hurdle is in the way of your real workforce work?"
Drop one goes live April 3rd. If you've dealt with the issues before, the use cases will be clear — and you'll be able to vote on what gets built next, leave feedback, and suggest new experiments.
If you'd like to be notified when April WWG Labs drops, email me at leah@wherewego.org.
