Inside Singapore’s government team that kills its own products

If Li Hongyi had his way, he would run the public sector quite differently.

In some ways, he already does. Open Government Products (OGP), the experimental team he founded in 2019 to develop tech-enabled solutions for citizens and the public sector, operates more like a tech company than a government unit.

It publishes detailed report cards on the products it has built, including their usage, quarterly costs, and the number of employees supporting them. This practice offers a level of disclosure that’s uncommon even among private companies.

To date, OGP has developed over 40 products, including the ParkingSG app and RedeemSG, the digital voucher system used by millions of Singaporeans.

Building tech products within the public sector can be a slow process. Some of the unit’s products take months to find their first user. Getting around red tape requires persistence – and sometimes ingenuity.

A few moments before our interview, Li took the stage at Tech in Asia Conference 2026 to share how almost every single one of OGP’s products exploits a “bureaucratic vulnerability” in some way.

This lets them get shipped faster: ParkingSG, for instance, doesn’t require a username or password. Personal data is stored on a user’s device rather than the application, reducing the government’s security burden.

Still, many of the team’s offerings face resistance. In 2024, an OGP-developed product drew complaints after many users reported difficulties using the web-based booking platform for public sports facilities such as badminton courts.

Yet a career in technology wasn’t always what Li had in mind.

He may be the son of Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s former prime minister, but all he wanted to do as a child was “play and make video games.”

Li also excelled in school, which eventually earned him a government scholarship to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The plan was to pursue physics and economics. He had largely accepted that his path would be linear: studying, getting good grades, and returning to a government ministry to “write some policies.”

A Google internship changed the course, however. Later, he swapped physics for computer science.

Li speaks fast, words and ideas spilling out. He’s verbose, charismatic, and very convincing – an important trait to have when your job is, in a nutshell, to convince people there are better ways to be doing things.