This Idaho-based innovation strategist is joining our team to drive user-centered product design that can be of service to City Bureau’s communities

By Grace Del Vecchio

Portrait taken by Caroline Olsen

We are excited to welcome Eve Lacivita to the team as City Bureau’s new Director of Product!

Eve is a Chicagoland native turned Idahoan, currently based in Boise. She boasts over 15 years of product management and strategy experience ranging from big tech companies like Motorola and Intuit to small nonprofits. Eve prioritizes a user-centered approach and in her new role, she will work to ensure the City Bureau’s products — websites, tools and processes — are designed with our communities in mind. Outside of the job, Eve has a plethora of hobbies – she’s a book and cat lover and enjoys running, hiking and traveling, as well as a good puzzle and round of trivia. 

We asked Eve to share a little bit about her experiences, her background and what she’s bringing to the role. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length and clarity.

What is your connection to place and where you call home?  

I grew up in the Chicago area to a mother from Chicago and a father from Wisconsin, and spent a good chunk of my adult life in Chicagoland as well, so I have strong roots in Chicago and the Midwest. 8 years ago, I fell in love with Idaho on what was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and now live in Boise, where I get to experience a different kind of city living that’s intimately tied to outdoors and the mountains. I’ve ended up finding community and a sense of place here in ways that I never expected, and this is home now. At the same time, I’ll always be from Chicago. It’s odd to have a strong sense of rootedness in two such very different places, but I’m very fortunate to have experienced “home” in both my city of origin and my adopted city. That’s rare and I treasure it.

You are big tech turned non-profit. Tell me about your path through your various roles.

I’m a very impact-led person who fell into tech kind of by accident, which ended up being a good fit, but I never lost my sense of purpose. I care deeply about issues of equity, access, and opportunity, and basically bent every role I ever held as far as possible toward customers with the greatest needs. When I worked in the mobile industry, for example, I always wanted to work on the least expensive phones, because that meant working with customers in places where there was no landline infrastructure, and where access to a mobile device could be make-or-break for having a living income. For a long time I lived a “double life” of developing new product innovations in traditional tech companies, while on the side helping nonprofits to design programs for the greatest possible impact with the help of those same innovation methods. Eventually, I found my niche by translating product work to the nonprofit space, enabling organizations that want to scale their services and innovate impact with the help of technology to do so in human-driven, tested ways. 

What drew you to City Bureau and to building with the Documenters Network? 

City Bureau and Documenters play a critical role in making the decisions of government transparent and comprehensible, and that’s never been more important. So it’s very exciting work. The work of Documenters is fundamentally human-first, with community members reporting out on the decisions and actions of local government, but technology is an essential mediator to connect Documenters with government and Documenters reporting with wider communities. The opportunity to design tools and products to make those connections more seamless, create visibility for reporting, and help people make sense of the workings of government is something I’m really looking forward to. 

How do you approach your work with product management and design? How would you explain your work to City Bureau’s various communities–program participants, readers, and partners?

My work is to strategize, design, and implement (with many partners) how custom-built web apps and related technology (like Documenters.org) can help us deliver services to the community. 

I use a human-centered design approach, which, when you strip away the jargon, basically means starting from deep research into what problems and opportunities exist in the community, then collaborating with the community to develop solutions that truly work by iteratively testing and fine-tuning together. 

When I teach human-centered design, I tell people that at the end of the day, there are only three things that REALLY matter:

  1. Know your users and engage them every step of the way

  2. Fall in love with the outcomes, not the product. Product is just a means to an end; the question that matters is, “does this solve the problem?”

  3. Big bangs are great for the universe, but not for people. Start small, understand your impact, and iterate continuously. 

So you can expect my work to reflect this approach – a lot of engagement, sharing of new ideas and testing into them, and inquiry into what works and what doesn’t.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

I’m always excited to brainstorm new ideas – reach out any time!

To connect with Eve, feel free to reach out at eve@citybureau.org