Case Study
Closing the Trust Gap
OpenGov 311 was losing $676k in deals. One competitive audit changed the company's iOS and Android strategy.
Summary
OpenGov 311 — the citizen service-request platform residents use to report potholes, code violations, and missed pickups — was losing competitive deals and cross-sell revenue to specific, nameable product gaps nobody had connected to a roadmap. Tracing the problem from sales data to a public trust gap surfaced a deeper issue: response times vary by neighborhood income and race in ways internal CRM data never shows, and 311 lacked the participatory features that let residents see a request wasn't being ignored.
Problem
Snowflake, Salesforce, and Aha data showed $8.66M in closed-lost deals referencing "311," with $676k traceable directly to missing functionality — plus roughly 1,550 existing accounts with adjacent OpenGov products but no 311 attached, and zero post-sale gap votes recorded, a blind spot on churn risk nobody was tracking.
Approach
I audited 26 competing 311 platforms feature-by-feature, ran independent manual and AI-assisted thematic analysis across App Store, Reddit, and news sentiment, and cross-referenced published municipal studies showing response-time disparities by neighborhood income and race — a perception problem invisible to internal data. That research named nine missing participatory features (commenting, upvoting, following, watch areas, and more) and, weighed against ADA Title II deadlines and WCAG accessibility testing, made the case to build native in React Native rather than ship a WebView/Capacitor hybrid.
Outcome
The accessibility findings became the basis for OpenGov's company-wide native-app standard — React Native over WebView/Capacitor for every product, not just 311 — and the equity findings became the case for a public, checkable map rather than a defensive response. A modeled build case projected 75% Year 1 ROI on a $108.5k dev investment against the $676k in addressable revenue: real, prioritized numbers, not yet fully recovered.