How PPI Began

And the belief about government that still drives the work

After decades inside government, Ryan and Justine had seen what becomes possible when public servants get the space, structure, and support to fix what's broken.

That conviction is what became Partners in Public Innovation.

PPI's co-founders, Justine Hinderliter and Ryan Hunter, have spent their careers inside and alongside government, working across HR, labor and employment law, process improvement, crisis response, change management, data analytics, and leadership. From the City and County of San Francisco to public agencies around the country, they've seen what public service looks like at its best, and what happens when the systems meant to support the work start failing the people inside them and the communities they serve.

The project that started it all

Back in 2018, Justine was the Chief People Officer at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). The agency had been approved to fill 600 positions that year and managed to fill only 250.

Hiring managers had gotten so desperate to fill their vacancies that some had started classifying roles as temporary just to bypass the backlog. Which, unsurprisingly, created a whole new set of problems.

Morale suffered and HR staff were buried in the work. Hiring managers were frustrated and good candidates dropped out. The process had become painful for pretty much everyone involved.

So Justine brought in Ryan and his team from the San Francisco's Process Improvement Program to help fix it.

What followed was an 18-month effort to completely rethink how hiring worked at SFPUC. The team mapped the current process on a literal 40-foot sheet of paper that wrapped around the executive conference room, dug into the data, and listened carefully to the people closest to the work: the HR staff toiling in the process, the hiring managers wanting to fill their roles, and the candidates trying to navigate the process from the outside.

The result was months cut from the time to hire, and HR moved from one of the lowest-morale groups in the agency to the highest.

Tiffany Archuleta (pictured) was one of the lead staff members in this project, and she has since joined Ryan and Justine at PPI as the Director of Communications and now leads large-scale change projects on her own.

That "genesis project" is still one of PPI's favorites to share, and not just because of the results. It proved something Ryan and Justine still believe deeply: the people already inside government usually know far more about what is broken, and how to fix it, than they are given credit for.

They just need the space, support, and structure to do it well.

It also made something else pretty obvious: Ryan and Justine worked really well together. They brought different skill sets, but shared the same conviction that local government is worth improving.

After that project, it was clear they had to keep going.

From one project to a larger practice

Since then, PPI has worked with dozens of cities, counties, states, and special districts on the kinds of problems that quietly wear organizations down: hiring systems that take too long, permitting processes that frustrate applicants and staff, procurement rules that are hard to navigate, strategic plans that struggle to move from paper to execution, and teams that keep solving the same problem over and over again.

The details change, but the pattern usually does not. Somewhere inside the system, people can already see what isn't working: they know where the workarounds live, which steps add zero value, and where the policy and reality no longer match.

PPI helps turn that inside knowledge into visible, useable, lasting change.

That is the difference between simply listening to staff and actually changing how the work gets done. PPI helps teams turn what staff knows into a shared picture of the problem, a better process, clearer ownership, stronger follow-through, and the internal capacity to keep improving after the engagement ends.

What PPI does

PPI works with cities, counties, and public agencies across the country to help their teams improve the systems behind public service.

Ryan, Justine, and the PPI team are not consultants who parachute in with a deck full of buzzwords, leave you with a report, and disappear.

PPI works with the team, gets close to the problems people encounter every day, co-create solutions drawn from the agency's own expertise, and builds the internal capacity to keep improving after the engagement is over.

Because the goal is not just to fix one process. The goal is to help public agencies build the confidence, capability, and operating discipline to keep making government work better.

Take a Look at What We've Done

Chat with Ryan or Justine