Come for the tool, stay for the network

My former business partner at a16z, Chris Dixon, wrote a short blog post in 2015 with the above title, in which he described how to bootstrap a network effect.

For technology companies – and for many other organizations – network effects are the ultimate way to sustain long-term business value. For the uninitiated, “network effects” describe situations where the value of a product or service increases as the number of users increases. A telephone is fairly useless if there are only 2 people in the world who have phones and can thus communicate, but a telephone network becomes more valuable as millions of people join the network and can talk to virtually anyone. Facebook is a network effects business – the more people on Facebook, the more value each user derives from being able to interact with (at this point) virtually everyone on the planet.

But networks are hard to build from scratch, so Chris offered a suggestion for how some companies have kickstarted their way to a network by creating a “tool,” some product or service that is independently valuable to the initial users of a system. Once these initial users find value in the tool – and thus creates enough of a critical mass of users – the platform can then leverage these users to “stay for the network.”

Instagram did this successfully in its early days. It built photo filters initially to attract users – that feature had independent value to the users, as it turns out we like looking at ourselves in funny/different ways. As more users came to Instagram for the filtering tool, the company then made it easy for users to share photos on other existing networks – e.g., Facebook and Twitter at the time. Sharing on other platforms enabled Instagram to eventually create its own sharing network – and the rest is history.

What does any of this have to do with OPM?

Well, we at OPM are now trying to build a network of our own to address a critical skills gap that we see in the federal government – namely, early career talent.

Roughly 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, compared with about 22% in the non-government workforce. By a factor of 3:1, the federal government is massively under-indexed on early career talent! I’ve written previously about how and why we got here.

Tech Force – a 2-year program targeting early career engineers, data scientists, AI specialists, product managers, etc., represents our first foray here. And it is going well – we are already starting to see strong interest from early career professions and agencies are hiring talented individuals who may have overlooked opportunities in the public service.

Today begins the second leg of our stool in fixing this problem and building an even broader early career talent network. For the first time, OPM is launching a cross-agency, early career talent network – aptly found at earlycareers.gov – to bring a broad cohort of full-time employees into the federal workforce. We are starting with five common job categories where we see current demand for early career talent – finance, human resources, engineering, project management and procurement.

As with all networks, we are bootstrapping it from a standing start. The “tool” here is that applicants can express their interest in and seamlessly apply for roles across the federal government. The “tool” for the participating agencies is that OPM is doing a lot of the initial legwork to fill the top of funnel and help efficiently present qualified applicants for their roles.

But the real value is the network we are building – the more applicants we get, the more agency roles we can bring onto the system, and the more agency roles we bring on, the more job opportunities we offer to the network, et cetera. The ultimate goal here is very simple, but audacious: Make it really simple to match the best talent with the best opportunities. The single-user mode of the past – where a single applicant applied to a single job opportunity as a single agency – doesn’t accomplish that goal. But a network model will.

Network effects are great – if you can create them – but they require sustenance to sustain value.

Recruiting great early career talent is one thing; getting them to stay is another. Talented employees stay in an organization because they are surrounded by smart people, they can do their best work every day, they work for managers who provide feedback and care about their career development, they believe in the mission of the organization, and because they (and their colleagues) are held accountable for results and rewarded for success.

This is why to solve the early career talent gap in government, OPM is also undertaking a series of changes to build a high-performance culture in the federal government.

We are creating a system where individuals are hired based on demonstrated talent, not one based on where/whether they went to college or how long they have been in a job.

We are creating a system that creates accountability for all employees, not one in which well-intentioned managers are faced with a dizzying array of challenges when they try to manage under-performing employees.

We are creating a system that differentiates good performers from outstanding ones and rewards and recognizes behavior that meaningfully goes above and beyond, not one in which everyone is ranked the same and bonuses are “peanut-buttered” throughout the organization.

We are creating a system where promotions and new job opportunities are based on demonstrated performance, not one in which tenure determines one’s advancement opportunities.

We are creating a system where it’s ok to take some “measured risk” when innovative thinking creates massive upside for the American people, not one in which we force employees to do things the same way we have always done them because we are afraid of potentially rocking the boat.

All of these are changes that OPM is driving to sustain the kind of high-performance, accountable environment that will attract and retain federal employees who deliver effectively and efficiently on behalf of taxpayers.

If any of this resonates with you, please come for the tool and stay for the network!