Li Hongyi: Google PM to GovTech Leader, Scaling Digital Infrastructure & Fighting Scams with Systems - E559
“You don't have to have management structures be purely control systems—they can be focused on empowerment systems as well. I think the assumption that most people make is that management structures are purely control structures, which is that the CEO, or the minister, or the Perm Sec, or whoever has a thing they want, and they tell the director, who tells people, and everyone's job is just to unlock. It's a massive control structure in order to do what the boss wants you to do. But as you know for yourself in VCs, yes, you need a little bit of that. But sometimes what you actually want is an empowerment structure.” - Li Hongyi, director of Open Government Products
“The concept of ‘put in where you're parking and pay money’ is a very simple concept. It's not a big idea. In fact, I think everybody who's ever used a paper coupon is like, ‘Why you make me do this? Why can't I just use my phone?’ The idea is not hard. The difficulty was getting all the stakeholders to want to do this and to integrate with all of the enforcement systems to actually make it happen. Just to give you a sense of scale—building the actual software for the app probably took two, at most three months, at least for the first build. We obviously iterated on it since then. But the real challenge was realizing that for most of the parking lots, we didn't actually have digital records of how much they cost.” - Li Hongyi, director of Open Government Products
“My first experience with a really good boss—not that my other bosses were bad—but the first time I really felt like, ‘Wow, I learned a lot,’ was with my manager on the search team, Peter Lindsley. He was the PM on Image Search when I was there. I remember when I was looking around within Google and talking to different people, I spoke to him and he was just really excited about all the things we could do. When you talk to other people, they’d say, ‘Oh, why are you interested in this?’ and you’d give some ideas, share some thoughts, try to solve the problem like a student putting on their puzzle-solving brain. But with Peter, I remember talking to him and saying things like, ‘Oh yeah, for image search, we could put a big map at the top of the page when someone searches for a place.’” - Li Hongyi, director of Open Government Products
Jeremy Au sits down with Li Hongyi, director of Open Government Products, to explore his journey from aspiring physicist to building digital tools for public service. They discuss agency, leadership, and the realities of driving change in government—from the impact of a Google internship to lessons in management and building systems that protect against fraud.