Seattle’s toughest challenges don’t live neatly within departmental lines. Issues like affordability, community safety, homelessness, or navigating City services require a coordinated response. We partner closely with the Mayor’s Office and City departments to deliver on core priorities and improve residents’ day-to-day experience with government. Through modern data approaches, project leadership, and empathy with those with lived experience, we make sense of complexity, redesign systems, and spark new ideas to make lasting change.

The Innovation & Performance Team (IP), housed in the City Budget Office, was created in 2016 to provide City leaders with dedicated research, data science, human-centered design, and experimentation capacity. The team crystallized the innovation model during the pandemic. We drove efforts that mobilized more than one million pieces of PPE for shelters and elder-care facilities, designed COVID-19 testing sites that were replicated 13 times across King County and served over 800,000 residents, and launched the nation’s largest civilian-run vaccination site at Lumen Field.

Today, we apply the same urgency to the City’s most complex, cross-departmental challenges, where there are no clear solutions.  

IP supports City leaders through three core capabilities: 

1. Innovation Project Delivery
2. Data-Driven Decision Making
3. Human Centered Design. 

Underpinning all three of these capabilities is a commitment to creativity, foresight, and strategic thinking. We are committed to helping leaders see around corners, imagine new possibilities, and design solutions that work for the future, not just the present.

Innovation Project Delivery

Leadership is mobilizing people to tackle tough problems that don’t have clear or easy solutions.

Everyone talks about breaking down silos, but few recognize the immense effort, time, and trust it takes. 

We offer over a decade of experience and relationships that help leaders break down complex challenges into clear, actionable solutions that create measurable impact.

• Explore what’s possible, not just what’s familiar. We bring disciplined, repeatable methods to help Seattle solve complex problems with urgency and clarity.
• Move ideas from insight to implementation. We combine rapid diagnosis, cross-departmental collaboration, and structured experimentation to figure out what works in the real world.
• De-risk decisions. We use discovery research, systems mapping, prototyping, and resident input to deliver real solutions that can scale.

Data-Driven Decision Making

You can’t fix what you don’t understand. 

We strengthen the City's ability to make data-informed, equitable, and evidence-based decisions by learning from quantitative data and the qualitative lived experience of our residents. 

• Create shared facts. We enable city leaders to use timely, high-quality information to create deep knowledge and shared understanding of problems, potential solutions, and fit across stakeholders and departments.
• Build strong data infrastructure. We co-chair the City's Data Governance Board and led the development of a Seattle Citywide Data Strategy to build a strong data infrastructure and advance data practices with collaboration and equity at its core.
• Look around corners. We leverage advanced data methods to not only understand the past, but anticipate future impacts through simulations, predictive models, and early warning systems.

Human-Centered Design

When you design for everyone, you design for no one.

Poorly designed systems shift the burden onto the user to navigate complexity that should have been solved upstream.

We focus on making government services simpler, more equitable, and easier to access. 

• Reimagine services from resident experience. We use creative design tools, such as human-centered design, behavioral insights, and continuous feedback from residents, to reimagine services based on the resident’s point of view and build systems that adapt as needs change.
• Make government easier to navigate and more responsive. We redesign processes, policies, and technology across to make government easier to navigate and more responsive to community needs.
• Center lived experience. We gather real data about performance from the perspective of the resident.