Product Policy Manager / Lead

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.

The Role

Policy work often involves long clearance chains, repeated rounds of review, and a clear separation between those who set direction and those who execute it. This can leave capable officers with less room to act on their judgment than their experience warrants.

If that gap is familiar to you, this role is built differently: closer to delivery, end-to-end ownership of the policy implementation loop, where your judgment carries weight because you understand the work rather than because of your grade, and where you're expected to raise a problem as soon as you see it rather than wait for it to surface elsewhere.

Policy written apart from delivery tends to look sound on paper and fall apart once implemented. A strong officer can hold that line for one team, but without a function whose job is to catch it early, the same pattern returns on the next.

Product Policy exists to be that function: officers sit inside OGP's product teams, not above them. They sit in the stand-ups, co-writing policy with the people who have to ship it, and are able to go directly to whoever can unblock them. They sit close enough to the decision that they're often the approving authority: work is judged by whether it changes what a team builds, not by how it reads in a deck.

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 We're Looking For

We care more about how you think than your résumé. Some things are non-negotiable:

• Comfortable picking up tech policy frameworks (e.g. data governance, IM8, PDPA) fast, and translating what they actually mean for an OGP product

• You've worked at the seam between policy and delivery, or you're ready to. You should be comfortable enough with both technologists and civil servants to translate between them

• You can hold an agency relationship yourself, including the difficult version of that conversation

• You can tell a policy that's landing from one that only looks like it, and you're willing to say so before it's welcome

• Being technical already is a plus. Getting technical on the job is not optional. You don't need to arrive able to read the codebase. You do need to arrive intending to. Officers who can't follow the technical argument end up managing relationships instead of shaping decisions, and you set that ceiling for your whole team by where you put your own

• You want public impact, and you're tired of watching good ideas die in the gap between policy and product

Working at OGP

Ownership and Autonomy — Beyond technical tasks, this means having autonomy to voice opinions and suggest future directions. Building what you believe in drives the creation of great solutions.

Rapid Prototyping — We prioritize testing ideas over debating them, allowing us to identify problems quickly and convey possibilities to others. This fail-fast approach accelerates innovation.

Flexibility — We provide flexible work arrangements based on what works best for our team and its members, fostering a productive and supportive environment.

Continuous Learning — Drive professional growth by exploring new architectures, frameworks, and technologies. With dedicated yearly learning months and hackathons, continuous learning is essential as we tackle innovative ideas and challenges.

Mission-Driven — Our work is dedicated to the public good, aiming to improve the lives of Singapore citizens. We focus on creating impactful solutions that enhance the community and the place we call home.

Projects OGP has worked on include:

ScamShield — iOS and Android mobile apps, enhanced in August 2024, help users check and report suspicious communications. The apps automatically filter known scams using an AI-powered machine learning classifier. An Admin Dashboard also allows police to verify reported scams.

ParkingSG — A mobile app alternative to parking coupons. It lets users pay, extend, and refund their parking sessions just using their phones.

RedeemSG — Helps the Singapore Government to create, send and track redemptions of digital vouchers easily.

COVID-19 Vaccination — A suite of systems built to enable Singapore's national vaccination campaign for COVID-19. This includes informational sites, appointment booking systems, and records management systems.

— An open repository of all the Singapore Government's public data. It helps people understand the data using visualizations and articles, and provides real-time APIs for developers to use.

Isomer — Provides government agencies with an easy-to-deploy static website building and hosting service to create usable, secure and faster informational websites quickly.

FormSG — A form builder tool for agencies to self-service and create online forms that capture classified data, with the goal of replacing paper forms.

PaySG — Was developed to enable digital payments for government services, and was initially used for payments for COVID-19 swab tests and Stay-Home Notices for incoming travellers to Singapore.

An overview of other OGP products can be found on our website