Digitizing a city
"It is evident that Marthe wholeheartedly strives to enhance services for citizens. Right from the beginning, she made a remarkable impression through her proactive approach. Marthe has organized and conducted workshops, effectively guiding the team in the right direction.
Now, Marthe is better known as “the Queen of Oslo Design System.”"
- the My Site Team, Oslo Origo
Supporting authenticated digital services across a siloed organization
Min Side had originally been part of a 2016 municipal digitization program. But by the time I joined, the product had stalled. Out of 485 and counting municipal services, only 18 were represented on Min Side. The team was maintaining these fragmented services from multiple agencies, the product had become a bottleneck, and no one had a clear plan for what to do next.
Uncovering a stalled product
We wanted to understand why Min Side hadn’t become what it was meant to be: the digital front door for Oslo citizens. I led a design discovery process with the team, involving interviews with several municipal agencies, Origo tech teams, and representatives from external benchmarks from other public service organizations. Developers and the UX designer co-led sessions with me, as I wanted to make sure everyone on the team participated in some way. This gave us a shared view of the landscape, and made our insights stronger. We focused on both tech capacity and organizational readiness, not just usability.
Min Side was a good idea, but it was organizationally premature
Most agencies didn’t have the internal resources to manage their own authenticated digital services. Our team had become the default owner of several in-between digital services, without the mandate or capacity to do it well.
Shifting our role from product ownership to system support
We reframed our team’s role from "owners of a product" to "connective tissue between services."
Together, we identified four ways we could have more impact:
Collaborate with the main municipal websites to host relevant logged-in experiences
Support and consult agencies in building their own logged-in areas
Gradually phase out the Min Side product
Build a design system to support consistency across the municipality's digital services
Proposing a product phase-out and launching a design system
The process of building down Min Side started while I was on the team and was completed after I left. Our team also initiated the Oslo Design System, starting from Oslo's established visual profile. We built on several of the challenges uncovered during our Min Side discovery work, especially the need for greater consistency and shared frontend infrastructure across digital services. I went on to become the lead Product Designer for the design system, which later became its own product team supporting designers and developers across the city.
Learning to let a product go
This work taught me the value of reframing, team-led discovery, and organizational design. It also showed me how important it is to question whether a product should exist.