Gavin Wye Portfolio for Deel · Design Director

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01 · Government of Barbados · with Public Digital · 2025–26

Building GovTech Barbados

The problem

Barbados had no national digital service. GovTech Barbados was one person, the chief executive, running it single-handedly.

The outcome

One person became thirty in eighteen months, and the team shipped. By June 2026, 72% of its commits were made with AI. A month after I left, over half still were.

Slide from the building-the-team story
Slide from the building-the-team story
Slide from the building-the-team story
Slide from the building-the-team story
Slide from the building-the-team story
Slide from the building-the-team story

Ship early, learn from real use

Even a plain online form beats posting paper or queuing to hand it in. We digitised the forms first, grouped them, then built them into services on a roadmap everyone could see.

Build the team where the work is

We hired in Barbados and grew the team while it shipped, mixing people who knew government with Barbadians who were new to it.

Make AI how the work gets done

Standards and house style were written as skills built into the tools the team already used, so the right thing was the easy thing.

Leave it running

The handover was a set of skills the team could run without me: capability at national level, not a document describing how.

To do: Check the start date (February 2025) and the team size figures.