SINGAPORE: Singapore Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s son, Li Hongyi, has revealed that his Open Government Products (OGP) division has designed 45 products that “serve the public good”. These products were tested on OGP’s Demo Day on Tuesday (11 Feb).
Mr Li founded OGP back in 2019 as a unit within Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), a statutory board of the Singapore government under the Prime Minister’s Office. Following a two-year stint as a product manager at Google, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate joined GovTech in 2013. He started out as a consultant and was promoted to the position of Deputy Director in January 2018.
A year and a half later, Mr Li founded OGP. The division, which works to build and deploy software products rapidly and scale smaller services quickly, has built services like ISOMER, FormSG and Parking.sg. All of the systems OGP is building are ‘open source’ – this means other Governments can use and adapt the code to suit their own needs.
Mr Li said, back in 2019, that he founded the new unit as he believes the Government can learn much from how big tech companies innovate quickly. He added: “We know how to have good technology, and we know we have big problems.”
While OGP shares GovTech’s resources, manpower and ethos, it has its own branding and workplace culture. Revealing that his team has adopted the culture of embracing failure that is prevalent in big tech companies, Mr Li had said: “Instead of treating [failures] like a big point of shame, we try to treat this in good faith – that all officers on the team are trying their best to build a good product. The idea is that you’re going to encounter problems, so you might as well try to learn from them the best you can.”
Mr Li’s team are also not required to produce lengthy reports or presentations – instead, team members spend just five minutes a week recording their achievements in bullet points. As for Mr Li himself, his typical work day reportedly involves product development, working with the Government bureaucracy, figuring out user strategy, project and team management.
Every January, Mr Li and his team pause all non-critical work and participate in a hackathon. He said that the hackathon helps his team “generate a lot of ideas that you would never have found if you just waited for instructions from what is traditionally senior leadership.”
He also believes it is important to include as many team members in the creative process as possible. In a 2019 interview, he said, “A leader has to support and facilitate as many of the good people you hire as possible to spend time thinking about the problem, so you maximise the amount of creative brain power.”
The latest OGP hackathon is the fifth one since the unit was formed. This year, the team developed projects including Bridge, a scheduling tool for medical transport services aiding social assistance recipients; Hawkernomics, an educational game that simulates the challenges of hawker life; and Spaceship, an AI-powered tool that allows public officers to quickly create tech prototypes.
Mr Li said on social media this week: “I’m really proud of what our team managed to achieve. In just a month they researched, built, and tested working prototypes with actual users. The work doesn’t stop here. We had over 200 guests from across the public service come to see our projects and find ways to work together and make these products a reality.”
He added, “Thank you to all the teams for a very intense month! There is nothing more inspiring than seeing so many energetic, capable people working together to imagine what the future could be. I’m looking forward to sharing more updates with everyone as we work to bring these projects live in the year to come.”
His mother, former Temasek CEO Ho Ching, was among those who shared his post on her own Facebook page.
Five facts you may not have known about PM Lee’s son, Li Hongyi