Building Data Analytics for National-Scale Budget Decisions

In government, the product is not the dashboard. It is the decision the dashboard enables a Minister to make.

Context

India's annual government expenditure exceeds $360 billion, allocated across hundreds of programs and ministries. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) oversees budget execution across all ministries and needs to make allocation decisions with limited time and enormous consequence. When I joined, budget performance monitoring was largely manual: spreadsheets, monthly reports, and presentations that were already outdated by the time they reached decision-makers.

The challenge was not technical. The data existed. The challenge was building analytical tools that Cabinet Ministers would actually use to change how they made decisions.

What I Did

I led a 15-person team that built real-time analytics dashboards for budget monitoring and performance evaluation. Our users were Cabinet Ministers, senior bureaucrats, and their immediate staff. I owned the product design, the data pipeline architecture, and the relationship with the PMO's leadership.

Approach

Design for the decision, not the data. Every dashboard screen started with a question a Minister would actually ask: "Which programs are behind on spending?" "Where is money being allocated but not utilized?" "Which states are falling behind on implementation?" We worked backward from decisions to data, not the other way around.

Radical simplification without dumbing down. Our users were some of the most analytically sophisticated people in government, but they had approximately 90 seconds per screen. Every visualization needed to convey its insight in under a minute while supporting drill-down for those who wanted depth. I enforced a "one question per screen" rule that the team initially resisted but ultimately adopted.

Building institutional trust, not just user trust. Government adoption is not just about building good software. It requires navigating institutional dynamics. I spent significant time with ministry officials understanding their reporting structures, their incentive systems, and their concerns about transparency. Several ministries were initially resistant to real-time monitoring because it exposed underperformance. Building trust meant showing them that the tool helped them improve, not just scored them.

Result

The platform was adopted across key government ministries and became a regular input to PMO budget review meetings. Budget utilization tracking moved from quarterly manual reports to near-real-time dashboards. The team grew from 5 to 15 during my tenure, and the analytical frameworks we built continued to be used and expanded after I left.

What I Took Away

Government is the ultimate high-stakes, low-iteration environment. You cannot A/B test a budget dashboard for Cabinet Ministers. You cannot ship a broken version and fix it next sprint. The experience taught me that product management in high-consequence environments is fundamentally about trust-building. The technical work matters, but it is maybe 30% of the job. The other 70% is understanding your users' institutional context and designing for it.