Over the last couple of years, I’ve had to interface with the San Francisco city government to try to get help with two different situations on my block and in my residential apartment building.
They were very different.
But my experience interacting with the city government followed the same pattern.
In both cases, something didn’t feel right. Not a single issue, but a set of conditions that, over time, began to create a sense of concern. Eventually, I started feeling unsafe.
So, I did what you’re supposed to do.
I reached out to the city for help, starting with one department. I shared a story about what I was experiencing. Through that story, I explained how things were connected, how they repeated, and how they were affecting daily life.
I was routed to more departments and had to re-share the story, repeatedly.
Each time, the response focused on a small piece of the story, if there was a response at all. A specific issue. A single request or report. Something that could be handled within the scope of a particular department’s responsibilities.
I kept pushing forward.
I followed up. I tried to figure out who handled what and how to get the right people involved. I tried to get them to work together.
But little to nothing changed.
The experience remained the same. The conditions persisted. The story I was sharing in conversation across departments never translated into any action that altered what it felt like to live there or walk down the block.
Over time, that had an impact.
I began to lose trust that anything would improve. And as that trust eroded in the city government, I began to feel less safe — not just because of what was happening, but because I no longer believed the system could change what I was experiencing.
There’s a basic expectation behind asking for help:
If you tell an organization what you’re experiencing, it should be able to take it in, understand it, and act in a way that demonstrates that understanding to change the experience.
But that’s not what was happening.
Which raises a question:
What is keeping the city from learning?
The City as a Product
I like to think of the city as a product that is both physical and digital.
Residents use it every day as they live, learn, work, and play. They rely on it to meet basic needs, like safety, cleanliness, connection, mobility, and quality of life.
City government is responsible for managing the product and ensuring those needs are met.
Like any product, how it is designed and the operating model the organization uses to build and improve it determines whether those needs are met. The result of that work is the product people use and the experience they have while using it.
Products improve when the organization managing it learns from its users. Product teams learn about user experiences, understand needs, identify where they fall short, and adapt to meet those needs. Sometimes that requires adapting internally to produce what is needed, and sometimes it means changing the product itself.
If the city is a product, the city government must do the same.
That starts by learning from residents.
Resident Inputs
Residents regularly attempt to teach the organization about their needs by sharing a story about their experience.
Sometimes that story is simple. A single issue.
Other times, it is more complex. A set of conditions that connect, repeat, and build over time, shaping how a place or space feels to navigate as the resident lives, works, learns, or plays.
In both cases, the story is the learning artifact that should drive improvement of the product. It provides the context needed to understand what is happening and why it matters.
But there is nowhere for that story to go.
The city does not accept stories as the starting input.
It accepts service requests as inputs.
A System of Services
The city is organized around services delivered through departments. Each department owns a specific type of work. Each interaction begins with a service request tied to that work.
For a single, isolated issue, this can work.
But most experiences are not isolated.
When a resident’s story spans multiple conditions or problems, the system requires many inputs instead of the single input they are trying to provide.
These requests may span multiple departments, different systems, and different processes. They are submitted in different ways, often with limited fields to describe what is happening.
Each one captures only a narrow slice of the experience, focused on the specific problem that service is designed to address.
Connections disappear. Patterns are not captured. The broader experience is broken into disconnected inputs.
Some parts of the experience do not fit into any existing service at all.
There is no place to submit them.
Those parts never enter the system.
Instead of interacting with a system that understands their experience and determines what needs to happen, residents must interact directly with the services themselves. In doing so, they must navigate a web of departments that reflects the city’s complex internal structure.
The burden of coordination shifts to the resident.
To get help, they must determine how to break their experience apart, map each part to a service, submit multiple requests, and manage the process across teams that are not designed to work together.
Impact on Residents
This creates a significant amount of work.
Work that should belong to the organization.
Residents must repeat their story across interactions, break it down and reshape it to fit different systems, and continually follow up to try to move things forward.
Even when they do, the outcome is uncertain. Individual requests may be processed, but the broader experience often does not change.
Some parts of what they are experiencing cannot be submitted at all.
Those resident needs remain unaddressed.
Over time, this takes a toll.
Residents burn out. They stop trying to share their story. They stop trying to navigate the system. Some disengage entirely. They stop trying to get help at all.
Throughout this journey, trust starts to continuously erode.
They lose trust that the system will respond. They lose trust that anything will change.
In some cases, that loss of trust becomes part of the experience itself.
People begin to feel less safe, not only because of what is happening around them, but because they no longer believe the system will work to keep them safe.
Impact on the City Government
Because the system does not learn from what residents are teaching through their stories, it cannot adapt. It continues to operate as it is, processing requests and completing tasks without changing how it works.
Over time, this way of operating becomes normalized. “This is how it works” defines the boundaries of what the organization believes it can do.
As a result, the organization cannot innovate to meet needs more effectively, and the experience does not improve. The resident story does not change.
At the same time, much of what residents are experiencing is never fully understood or addressed. Issues persist, grow, and new ones emerge, following the same pattern. By the time they become visible within the system, they are larger, more complex, and more impactful to the overall experience.
That failure compounds over time. As the experience remains unchanged, trust erodes, and as trust erodes, engagement declines. With less engagement, the organization has fewer opportunities to learn over time, which limits its ability to innovate.
The Missing Story
This article is a story about engaging with the city to get help. It is one that repeats across situations and residents.
Every day, residents share stories about what they are experiencing in the city. Those stories provide an opportunity for the organization to better understand their needs.
But the story is missing inside the organization. It is never captured. It remains with the resident, repeated in conversations and translated into fragments that the system can process. Much of the full story is lost in the process.
Because the story does not exist within the organization, the organization cannot learn from it. Without learning, it cannot innovate. Without innovation, it cannot evolve to meet resident needs and change the experience it delivers.
So, the experience remains the same.
And the story repeats.