DUO
Leading UX inside a multi-stakeholder government Integration program — translating citizen insights into concrete public-service epics that affect tens of thousands of newcomers to the Netherlands.
A government service that has to work for the people most likely to fall through it.
DUO's Integration program (Inburgering) supports newcomers to the Netherlands as they navigate one of the most consequential bureaucratic journeys of their lives. The service is high-stakes — failure to integrate has real legal and life consequences — and structurally complex, because it spans chain partners, policymakers, and multiple government bodies all operating on their own logic.
My remit as UX Lead inside the multidisciplinary team: translate scattered citizen insights into concrete epics and user stories the development team could build, while keeping chain partners and policymakers aligned on what mattered most for the actual users — newcomers themselves.
"This isn't a product where you can ship and iterate. The cost of getting it wrong falls on people who already have nowhere else to go."
Citizen insight → epic → sprint. Without the bureaucratic distortion.
The job wasn't to do research and hand it off. It was to be the connective tissue between citizens' lived experience, the development team's capacity, and the policy framework everyone has to operate inside.
Refinement sessions with developers and the product owner. Ensured user-research signal stayed visible in prioritization debates — even when policy or technical constraints pushed back.
Translated citizen insights into concrete epics and user stories — making sure the developer team had research-anchored requirements rather than abstract policy mandates handed down from above.
Worked with chain partners and policymakers across a complex information chain — bridging citizen experience back into systems that historically optimised for compliance, not usability or comprehension.
Active role in sprint planning, demos, and iterative progress monitoring — ensuring research informed not just what was built, but how shipped work was evaluated against actual citizen outcomes.
Two years embedded. Four shifts.
Mapping the chain
Started by mapping how decisions actually flow between policymakers, chain partners, and the development team — and where citizen voice gets lost in translation along the way.
Establishing UX as a backlog input
Embedded into refinement and prioritization. Made user research a structural input to backlog decisions — not an afterthought once the technical scope was already fixed.
Translating policy into epics
Built a translation layer between abstract policy mandates and concrete user stories — so developers could deliver against citizen needs, not just regulatory requirements.
Aligning multi-stakeholder reality
Continuous stakeholder work — keeping chain partners, policymakers, designers, and engineers aligned on the same citizen-first definition of success.
In public services, the user is also the citizen. Bad UX isn't a conversion problem. It's a civic one.
Citizen-first inside a compliance-first system.
Process, translation, and structure that turned abstract policy into citizen-grounded product work.