President’s Management Agenda: Improving the retirement life experience
My Role
I worked as a service designer and phase two project lead where I liaised between the project and President’s Management Agenda leadership.
The Challenge
Improve the retirement experience for low-income older adults by working across federal agencies and listening to the needs of older adults.
Skills
Co-design | Facilitation | Service Design | Stakeholder Management | User Research | Prototyping
As a person ages there are both new opportunities and new challenges. Instead of life getting simpler, many are faced with the daunting task of making critical decisions about healthcare, housing, and finances. This challenge is particularly hard for those with limited financial resources and networks of support. The sheer volume of information, complex bureaucracy, financial concerns, and health issues can be overwhelming and exacerbate the difficulties of making these important decisions.
President Biden prioritized supporting people through major life experiences. Executive Order 14058 on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government and the Biden Administration President’s Management Agenda formalized a framework for shifting our approach to service design and delivery from one focused on bureaucratic structures to one more focused on the perspective of the people that we serve.
How might we improve the experience of older adults with low to middle incomes approaching retirement?
*Due to confidentiality, some details have been removed from the case study.
Many older people in the United States cannot afford to retire. Difficult decisions and overwhelming complexities during retirement make for a stressful transition.
In this year long phase, I served as project lead and liaison between the project and and President’s Management Agenda leadership.
The cross-agency team was comprised of staff from: HHS (ACL and Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Social Security Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Management and Budget (U.S. Digital Service).
We identified possible solutions through two collaborative sessions with 15 community based organizations (CBOs), 12 national organizations, and 7 federal agencies who represented a diverse group of front line staff supporting older adults.
Outcomes
The build & test phase prototyped two concepts—a resource guide and a federal forum for front line staff.
The Federal Decision Support Guide consolidates benefit and program information from seven federal agencies to help older adults, their caregivers, and frontline staff make better-informed decisions about healthcare, finances, housing, and food benefits.
The Federal Forum on Serving Older Adults brings together staff from community-based organizations (CBOs) to learn from federal agencies and each other about a broad range of topics that matter to the communities they serve.
Explore + Design Phase: Research
The approach to understand the challenge space of retirement started by talking to the people closest to the experience.
During the 3-month discovery, the team spoke with people nationwide about this moment in their lives and where the government process could have been simpler and more helpful. The listening sessions captured honest conversations about people’s experiences, candid feedback on what could have worked better, and what really made a difference for them. The team spoke with 42 older adults and 40 front line staff at Social Security and community-based organizations. My role involved leading interviews with older adults and front line staff working with the LGBTQ+ community. Collaboratively, the team developed opportunity areas, and I advocated to apply an equity lens to identify additional burden and retirement challenges for marginalized communities.
“I will work until they throw dirt in my face” - John, 68
We learned about some of the biggest pain points we have the opportunity to address:
Barriers to saving
“I can’t really think about tomorrow if you have to concentrate on today. It’s so hard day-to-day that I don’t get caught up with what will happen next year as far as income.” - older adult
Day-to-day struggles make it difficult for many to save for retirement. Many workers do not have access to employer- sponsored retirement accounts.
Disjointed Network
“You can’t figure out who to trust, it’s too much. I can’t imagine people who didn’t have professional skills, jobs, education. You’ve got to do something to alleviate that whole system. …How do you find out what’s right for you and who to trust?” - older adult
People are on their own to make sense of an opaque and fragmented retirement landscape.
Compounding vulnerabilities
“I met a guy who was a [ride-share] driver. I would ride with him to work and he told me he helped people with their retirement. He gave me his business card. I gave him a call.” - older adult
Health concerns, as well as barriers to employment, affordable housing, and social support can combine to exacerbate vulnerability and lead to decreased quality-of-life in older age. Lack of adequate resources makes it harder to recover from financial or health related setbacks.
The team’s research shed light on a critical issue: older people seek better support to make decisions that are in their best interest to avoid losing out on benefits and to avoid penalties. Interviews with older adults and front line staff at community-based organizations (CBOs) consistently emphasized the need for clear and centralized information about federal benefits and programs. Through the research process, the team listened to individuals like Diana, a 64-year-old who expressed a common sentiment:
“I wish I could find an agency and place that would give me all the info instead of me having to call so many different people. Instead of people talking above me, talk at me so I can understand it.” - older adult
Build + Test Phase: Codesign with communities and service design
Following these workshops, we facilitated bi-weekly sessions with a testing cohort consisting of nine CBOs from the scoping workshops. The team collaborated with CBOs who are trusted resources for older adults looking for personalized, one-on-one support. CBOs understand the challenges the community faces but are often hampered by the scattered landscape of federal information — limiting their efficiency and impact.
“To the person who has the question it seems simple and direct, but it’s not easy to find those answers in the raft of manuals and websites. So they end up asking their neighbors and it ends up being urban legend.” – CBO staff member
The testing cohort provided iterative feedback and valuable insights about the needs of both their staff and clients, which directly influenced the development of prototypes. For instance, the team learned that CBOs often mail pamphlets because clients prefer printed resources, that older adults are usually focused on addressing one issue at a time, and that older adults rely on CBOs to help guide them through retirement decisions in a way that federal program staff are often not able to do.
Designing and testing the Federal Decision Support Guide
The Federal Decision Support Guide is designed to address needs of both CBOs and older adults: CBOs need to quickly access authoritative information about federal programs and benefits; older adults need information presented in a consolidated, easy-to-understand, and actionable format.
The testing cohort shared that the Federal Decision Support Guide should be organized in a way that allows them to easily curate relevant information for their customers and help guide them towards action. As a result, the guide is broken down into modules, for example “healthcare” or “housing,” that contain program information from multiple agencies.
Each module covers federal benefits and services available, rules and considerations for eligibility, how and where to apply, and where to turn for personalized assistance. Content is written in the first person and in an action-oriented format to address the real-life concerns of older adults, such as: “I’m raising my grandchildren, can they receive benefits?” or “I am having trouble paying for food. What help is there?”
Instead of giving customers the entire module at once, this question and answer format allows CBOs to select and share only the content that relates to the concerns clients have.
The cross-agency team and the testing cohort developed several drafts of the Federal Decision Support Guide, created user testing plans, and recruited staff and members of the public to test the modules. The content was tested for clarity, usefulness, and value with six front line staff and six members of the public. Using this feedback, the cross-agency team made improvements to improve plain language and modularity, and to clarify next steps consumers can take.
Designing and testing the Federal Forum for Older Adults
Staff at CBOs provide and connect older adults to assistance for a variety of needs such as housing, food, health care, and prescriptions. CBOs are especially critical in lower-income communities where older adults rely on free or low-cost assistance. However, staff turnover, the complexity of information, and the dynamic nature of federal programs and benefits makes it difficult to develop and maintain deep expertise across topics.
Peer-to-peer networking allows staff at CBOs to share learnings and understand changing federal program requirements to best support older adults with limited resources. However, opportunities for this type of convening are time-consuming to organize. As one CBO staff member explained,
“A kind of meaningful technical assistance is a convener, to be invited or included makes it easier for me to make those contacts.” - CBO staff member
The team shared the concept and gathered input from over 300 professionals across the country. Respondents included staff at local community-based organizations, state service providers, and national organizations. Over half of respondents reported working to provide services to older adults for over ten years.
The survey described the Federal Forum as:
Quarterly virtual convenings of federal agencies and staff from CBOs with the intent of building knowledge related to federal programs and creating an opportunity for peer-to-peer connection.
Presentations address complex and timely topics not covered in traditional trainings including how federal benefits and programs connect to the on-the-ground needs of low-income older adults and those that serve them.
Perceived Benefit: 94% of people strongly agree or agree (59% and 35% respectively) that “Participating in this community of practice would better help me serve older adults.” Nobody disagreed.
Desire to Participate: 95% of people strongly agree or agree (61% and 34% respectively) with the statement, “I would like to participate in these sessions myself.”
Impact
The guide covers topics of healthcare, housing for renters, housing for homeowners, food, taxes, debts & loans, and social security. The guides are available in English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.
Both prototypes were scaled to year long pilots, led by the Administration for Community Living (ACL). In 2024, six ACL-funded CBOs tested the guides with 652 older adults. Interviews, surveys, and focus groups were used to assess and explore how the guide can be improved to help older adults.
87% of coordinators reported that the guides gave clients more resources and 90% of coordinators agreed the guides made the process of obtaining benefits easier to understand.
In responses from older adults, 85% agreed that information provided in the Federal Decision Support Guide is comprehensive and 93% agreed with the statement, “As a result of the Federal Decision Support Guide, I know the next step I need to take to obtain benefits.”
The Federal Forum gathered over 380 participants who attended one of the three Forums and shared encouragingly positive feedback.
Following the June Forum, 97% of respondents agreed that the Federal Forum increased their access to materials and tools that will assist them in helping older adults make informed financial and healthcare decisions.
Furthermore, a majority agreed that their participation increased their understanding of federal programs, increased access to materials and tools, and will reduce the time it takes to navigate federal resources.