What Citizen Development Asks of a Large Firm

3 MINS

Alongside my computational design work at Jacobs, I serve as the Citizen Development Regional Coordinator for Asia. Citizen development means people outside a central software team building their own tools for their own work. The idea is simple. Making it work across a region takes more than handing out access to a platform.

The people closest to the work know the problem best

An engineer who repeats the same task every week already knows what a better tool should do. Citizen development gives that person a way to act on what they know without waiting in a long queue. That is the main reason it is worth doing.

Freedom needs some shared rules

When many people build tools, you also get many versions of the same idea, tools nobody maintains, and data stored in places no one can find. A regional coordinator's job is partly to connect people working on similar problems and partly to make the shared rules easy to follow. Good rules feel like help, not like a gate.

Visibility is half the work

A useful tool built in one office often stays in that office. Sharing what has been built, and who built it, helps others reuse it instead of starting again. It also gives builders recognition, which matters for keeping them involved.

Community before technology

My time as a chapter lead for an employee careers network taught me that participation grows through people and events, not announcements. Citizen development is similar. A platform gives people the ability to build. A community gives them the reason, and someone to ask when they get stuck.

Designing With the Desert, Not Against It

Automation Tools Start With the Engineer, Not the Script

Medha skipped presentations and built real AI products.

Medha Bansal was part of the August 2026 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 24 other talented participants.