A form platform that let government teams deploy without engineering.

Benefits applications, child welfare assessments, case management intake. These forms are often the first interaction between a vulnerable person and a government program. A wrong answer has real consequences. The forms are long, conditional, and complex by design.

Deloitte was building these forms custom for every client. Every engagement started with a blank Salesforce project. Every form needed its own development, testing, and maintenance. Nothing carried over. Everything took longer than it should.

The opportunity: build one platform that any Deloitte team could configure and deploy for any government program, without writing code each time.

The first version of the platform — called DCF — was built around a Conversational UI. One question at a time, linear, focused. For the right use case, it worked well. Data quality was high, shorter forms felt effortless, and several clients adopted it.

But it was built on an assumption: that the person filling out the form could answer each question before seeing the next one. For citizen-facing forms — someone applying for benefits from home — that held. For complex, multi-page government assessments, it didn't.

We were demoing to a US State client. We thought we'd sold it.

Their feedback was immediate: case workers operate in the field, meeting families in difficult situations. They need to see the whole form so they can plan the conversation — what questions are coming, what sections are next, how much is left. Asking one question, waiting, then asking the next would break the conversation. The meeting ended.

Case workers aren't filling out a form. They're having a conversation — in person or on the phone — while a form happens to be open.

The dev team had moved quickly after Indiana and built their own version: multiple columns, no clear hierarchy, no sense of flow. Functional in the way a spreadsheet is functional.

I rebuilt it around one question: what does a case worker actually need when they glance at the screen?

The answer — from watching day-in-the-life videos of case workers — was as little as possible, as clearly as possible. Every second they spend looking at the screen is a second they're not looking at the person across the table. When they do look, they need to know where they are, what's next, and how much is left. Instantly.

I never met a single user. The chain from me to the families filling out these forms ran five layers deep: India office, US office, state government, case worker, citizen. I designed for people I only knew through videos and secondhand notes.

The platform is still running. Still being expanded. Still rolling out to new clients. I found that out from colleagues after I'd already left.

Once the two-mode platform was stable, we built the features that made it production-ready for government scale.