Today, I\u2019m talking with Mina Hsiang, the administrator of the United States Digital Service (USDS), which is the tech unit of the executive branch \u2014 you might think of it as the White House\u2019s product and design consultancy for the rest of the government. The USDS was started by President Barack Obama in 2014 after the disastrous initial rollout of the healthcare.gov website, which now lets millions of people sign up for health insurance but launched as a buggy, unusable mess.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Mina was a member of the \u201csurge\u201d team<\/a> Obama brought in to salvage healthcare.gov, a process that took months. You\u2019ll hear her talk about how she worked from a card table with printouts of the user flow taped to the walls around her. After that, and an extensive career in and out of the private sector, she returned to be the third-ever leader of the USDS in 2021.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The USDS has a fascinating structure \u2014 it\u2019s composed of nearly 250 people, all of whom serve two-year stints developing apps, improving websites, and streamlining government services. The idea is to make leaving a Big Tech job for a term at the USDS a reasonable idea \u2014 the equivalent of design thinking public service. The concept is working \u2014 thousands of people are applying for roles, and the unit is bigger than ever, with big successes like the vaccines.gov website, a revamped Veterans Affairs website, and a new FAFSA form<\/a> for student loans.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Listen to Decoder<\/em>, a show hosted by The Verge<\/em>\u2019s Nilay Patel about big ideas \u2014 and other problems.\u00a0Subscribe\u00a0here<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But, as you might expect, fixing how the government\u2019s systems work can involve some thorny political and bureaucratic nightmares. Mina can\u2019t just tell the VA it\u2019s going to have a new app and ship it \u2014 that\u2019s not how the government works. A huge part of the job is making big agencies realize that they have to make tech products so people can actually use their services \u2014 Mina says a popular catchphrase at the USDS is that \u201csoftware is never done,\u201d which is meant to remind everyone that simply fixing an app or a website isn\u2019t the end of the road.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s a familiar issue for any software company, but the stakes for the government are much higher: these systems are how people get their healthcare and other critical benefits.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ve long been fascinated by the idea that the interface to the government is just too hard \u2014 that most people don\u2019t know what services are even available to them, and they certainly don\u2019t know how to take advantage of them quickly and easily. So I asked Mina about that and if things like AI chatbots could make it easier to have a unified view of government for the average citizen. Her answer is fascinating and really highlights the gap between the profit and growth motivations of Silicon Valley tech companies and the goals of the government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mina has a really refreshing way of looking at all of this, and this conversation made me think about how much more often we should think about software in a context that doesn\u2019t involve a giant corporation trying to sell you something.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay, Mina Hsiang, the administrator of the USDS. Here we go. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Mina Hsiang, you are the administrator of the United States Digital Service. Welcome to Decoder<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thank you. It\u2019s great to be here. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m really excited to talk to you. It feels like we are in a moment where the government thinking about technology is in vogue again, maybe it hasn\u2019t been for quite some time, maybe ever, but the idea that the government should have some capabilities and build good products and, in particular, have the capability to understand what\u2019s going on with AI. It seems like the nature of the government\u2019s relationship to technology and the tech industry has changed. Do you feel that as well?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think it always ebbs and flows, and it somewhat depends on society as a whole and how we are thinking about it. I certainly feel that in the 10 years that I\u2019ve been in and out of the Digital Service. Right now [there] is definitely a lot of energy around \u201cHow do we tackle these challenges and how do we take on these questions head-on?\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let\u2019s talk about the Digital Service. It started <\/strong>because of a catastrophe<\/strong><\/a>. You were there. The Obama administration tried to launch healthcare.gov; <\/strong>the site crashed<\/strong><\/a>. I think you were on <\/strong>the team that had to fix it<\/strong><\/a>. You had like a six-week sprint to fix it. Now it\u2019s here. We\u2019re 10 years into having a United States Digital Service. What is it? What is it meant to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And 10 years into a working healthcare.gov site\u2014<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [Laughs] Important to note, yeah, it still works.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Which is incredibly important, and the teams that are at centers for Medicare and Medicaid manage it exceptionally at this point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The US Digital Service is created as a place to bring in exceptional technologists and to work inside government to make the government work better through technology and design. How we do this is we recruit in incredible folks who have experience building the best, the most usable, the most equitable, the most efficient and scalable systems, technology products.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We put those people together with people who have expertise in how to get things done in government. So we build these teams of people, interdisciplinary teams, and we deploy those to agencies who are the execution arm of the government to work on critical programs and to supercharge the teams that are already working on those programs to help them set up interdisciplinary teams to ship excellent products, to deploy them against major problems that have a technology underpinning and a technology component, which, as you know, is basically everything these days, right?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s a broad remit, at this point.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n And I would add that some of the ways that this has shifted over time is we go into the agencies, we help them serve, recharge, their work on a specific program that is of critical importance, but now we\u2019re also, as you say, government has realized that it wants to build this capability and that this is central to our role. So we really work with the agencies to build out their internal capacity to do this as well. Helping them understand: What do product managers do? How do you hire engineers who are competitive from market and sort of standing up the types of management structures that will make all of this effective inside those agencies? So we are an execution arm but also trying to be a catalyst for change and evolution within government as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I feel like I\u2019ve been doing this show for two years, and the only question we\u2019ve been trying to answer is, \u201cWhat do product managers do?\u201d What do product managers do?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Product managers take a look at the core problem that you\u2019re trying to solve and the resources and tradeoffs available and really try and facilitate everybody getting to a path forward on how we should try and best solve that problem given the constraints, the resources available, what we consider a solution, whether it\u2019s financial, whether it\u2019s [the] number of users served. So I think their job is to build a path forward using the people and the resources available and to help everyone air their tradeoffs and make sure that we\u2019re really solving the problem we set out to solve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I asked that question partially to be silly because I think you could get 500 different answers at 500 different companies, but partially because it\u2019s really important in this context. The thing you\u2019re describing is almost like a consultancy with some internal capabilities.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But then you\u2019re going to build a team for someone else and walk away, and that team will have its own culture. How do you think about that tradeoff? As a consultancy, is it something different? There\u2019s a danger in mapping how the private sector works to the government, but that feels like a pretty close parallel.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that is a good model, with the caveat that consultancies operate under their own incentives. US Digital Service does not get paid more if we create more different tasks at an agency that requires our engagement. I would just say I think a consultant model is quite accurate, but there are some core differences. So we\u2019re not incentivized about how much business we can drive there. We are helping the agency.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We have extremely aligned incentives with the agency in a lot of ways in that our goal is to deliver services to the public, and we\u2019re in a position where \u2014 and consultants do this, too, but it plays out in different ways \u2014 we\u2019re partly hired by the agency, but we\u2019re partly hired by the American people. We\u2019re a part of the White House. The White House provides its degree of coordination and strategic direction for agencies, so they\u2019re also one of our key stakeholders. We\u2019re also in a position where we can tell the agency hard truths or help them redirect or help them think about different approaches, different objectives, in a way that I think can be hard if you\u2019re trying to sell business.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Government\u2019s crazy, right? There are a lot of systems. What\u2019s the biggest hack that you\u2019ve had to undo in your time in the government?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019ll go back to healthcare.gov just because it encapsulates so many of these things so perfectly. There were 30-something contractors \u2014 all of them were building different parts. There was somebody who was managing the infrastructure and somebody else who was managing the front end and someone else who was doing the user research. And there wasn\u2019t a central standup or operations control or anything in advance. I arrived several weeks after the site was already out, and I got brought into this situation, and I\u2019m like, \u201cOkay, so what? The site is down, so I can\u2019t go through the site myself.\u201d And so, I\u2019m like, \u201cWhat questions are we asking people?\u201d And everyone looks around, and nobody knows what information we\u2019re collecting from users to determine if they can have health insurance. I called the call center because you can sign up on the call center, and they asked me a bunch of questions, and I wrote down the questions and I sent it around.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was like, \u201cThese are the questions they asked. This is the data we collect.\u201d And so starting point: be a user. I think I applied for health insurance \u2014 don\u2019t tell anyone because we weren\u2019t supposed to do that \u2014 but I applied for health insurance 30 times. I just kept making up new email addresses. And over time, we built… Actually not over that much time. We had to put in instrumentation. And so we got every screenshot. We had a bunch of users go through and take screenshots so we could figure out where monitoring was and figure out user flows. And my desk was like this folding table in the hallway, and I\u2019m in charge of metrics and a few other things and product management and trying to put together key metrics. And on the wall, I have pinned all of the user flows. I have this great photo. It\u2019s literally all these pieces of printer paper with stickies on them where we want to put in Mixpanel monitoring.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And people from every different contractor are coming over and being like, \u201cOh, where did you get that? That\u2019s really helpful. That helps me debug this. That helps me debug that.\u201d And you\u2019re like, \u201cNo, I went to the website, and I printed it out.\u201d And so, I think, you asked about the product mindset, just making sure that everyone feels like a user and takes that mindset. That was just so eye-opening and really helpful for the rest of the time because the frequency with which all I have to do is turn around my computer and be like, \u201cLet\u2019s do this together,\u201d is tremendous. So many amazing stories like that from that time.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The idea that you\u2019re going to bring a product culture into an agency, I\u2019m guessing 10 years ago, that was a much harder road than it is now. Has that changed? I don\u2019t think you\u2019re explaining on a fundamental level what a product manager does anymore. I hope not. But the idea that you\u2019re going to bring that culture to the agency and that they\u2019re going to adopt that culture, that changes the agency itself, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It definitely changes the agency. I would say we\u2019ve made a lot of progress, and things are really different. I don\u2019t show up in an agency anymore and have them say, \u201cWhat is user research?\u201d Well, sometimes \u201cwhat is human-centered design?\u201d But \u201cwhat is user research?\u201d is not a question \u2014 like \u201cwhat is the cloud and it\u2019s completely unsecure and I couldn\u2019t use it,\u201d definitely conversations I had to have 10 years ago. You were joking when you said, \u201cWhat is a product manager?\u201d But it\u2019s a squishy concept. Even in the companies where I used to lead product, it was a squishy concept. So I think explaining what specific roles should do and how they should fit together actually ends up being a lot of our work. And a lot of our work is not just explaining it but showing [it]. So we do the first project together, and it\u2019s like, \u201cWhat does a product manager do?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You say it the way I sort of said it, and that\u2019s kind of the same as a project manager. It\u2019s kind of the same as a policy expert. We actually just live the program and live a project and all do it together for six months, a year, 18 months. And that really helps them see, \u201cOh, these are the ways that it\u2019s really materially different from what came before.\u201d If you go on USAJobs right now and look through all the federal jobs, there are not enough product manager jobs. And if you look at all the people across the government, how many product managers should we have? There are not as many as you would expect given the number of programs and products there are. So there\u2019s still a lot to be done there. Our colleague Jen Pahlka likes to talk a lot about how product managers are kind of a key piece of this and that, I think, still, there\u2019s room to grow.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The tension there that seems really apparent to me is that if you\u2019re the person in charge of the Social Security Administration, the way people experience it is through SSA.gov. It might be that the administrator of the Social Security Administration needs to be the product manager because they\u2019re ultimately accountable for the success of the thing that people only experience through a website or an app or something. Is that just me inventing a tension, or is that a real tension? Do those people get that they understand that the user interface of their product is the product?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We like to talk about product CEOs in tech a lot, and I think a lot of exceptional products are built by CEOs who have a real product mindset, who live inside the product, who take customer calls. The way you get to very senior positions in government is quite frequently through a policy process, through policy expertise, which has not a lot to do with execution in government for lots of reasons. Policy is deciding what we\u2019re going to do, and implementation is doing it, and never the two shall spend much time together. So no, I don\u2019t think most agency heads think of themselves\u2026 Some of them do, and we\u2019ve come a long way in helping instill that perspective, but that is not how, when they get in seat, they think about things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think that is one of the opportunities that we have as USDS. We go into an agency in a very senior position to work directly with the agency leadership on a specific program. So we have done a lot of work with the Social Security Administration, and some of it is bringing them along with, \u201cWhat should you be asking your team to make good product choices?\u201d \u2014 like making sure that they get demos, making sure that they see videos from users of where do users get confused, because not all of us are the target demographic for the services.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then, taking a further step back and saying, \u201cYour product is not just your website; it\u2019s your website, as you said, and your call center and your in-person service.\u201d And how do we stitch those together? Because, for a variety of reasons, over time, those are all managed by completely different business units with completely different technology systems, so there\u2019s a real need to sort of pull those together and have product mindset from the top down.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I want to come back to just some big-picture Decoder<\/em> questions for a minute. This is a lot of tasks. The government is vast, it\u2019s sprawling. There are a lot of things to do. I\u2019m sure you have a lot of inbound. How big is the USDS?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n USDS is 230 people right now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Definitely not. It\u2019s the biggest we\u2019ve ever been, and I get unfulfillable requests every single week, as you would expect. There is such an incredible need for these capabilities across the government and whether they should all sit in, as you said, a consultancy attached to the White House, is a great question. But the total number of engineers across the civilian government is significantly smaller than at one big tech company. And the number of services and products that we are managing and developing is dramatically larger. So no, there\u2019s a lot of need and tremendous opportunity. We are hiring \u2014 agencies are hiring right now. There are thousands of open positions<\/a> for incredible technical talent across the federal government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So you\u2019re 230, it\u2019s the biggest you\u2019ve ever been, you\u2019re hiring, and you\u2019re getting bigger. How is the USDS structured?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We are structured a lot like a consultancy also. So we have communities of practice, so verticals, that are all of our engineers, all of our product managers, all of our designers, all of our procurement experts. And then we have people deployed on project teams. Those have their own internal structure but are necessarily temporary, but some of those are three months temporary and some of those are three years temporary. So that varies. And then we also have a significant operational side of the house. It takes a lot of work to\u2026 so everybody is on a two-year term or less. I know you spoke with President [Barack] Obama<\/a> about this. We bring people in, and working in government can be an incredibly hard mental shift.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Over time, it has evolved, and we have a lot more folks who have been here or have heard about it more directly, but we bring people in for a short period of time. Sometimes they decide to stay the entire two years, but that exercise, hiring in government, is challenging. Convincing people is challenging. We have a big talent team that really works to both do recruiting and help us process all of that hiring and manage I think we are on track to do almost 2,000 interviews this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So it\u2019s just like a significant operation to get to where we need to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Is the management layer of those 230 people, is that on two-year terms as well, or is that more fixed?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Everybody\u2019s on a two-year term except, I guess, technically me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n How do you maintain a culture if everyone\u2019s coming and going, or is that even important to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Oh, I think it\u2019s incredibly important. We spend a lot of time together. I mean, I think it\u2019s challenging, and it\u2019s even more challenging in sort of a hybrid world, but people are deeply united by what they came here to do, right? People come here because they are deeply motivated by the mission, want to have a massive impact. USDS, we take people who have a lot of experience, and part of the reason that we\u2019re doing so many interviews is we\u2019re on track to get almost 6,000 applications this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We will hire 1 to 2 percent of those people. So this type of being able to drop into an agency, help them from a technical perspective, but also have the exceptional EQ to really help bring the agency along and teach them how to do that. It\u2019s a rare skill, and it requires experience. I think we have folks who have maturity and are deeply united by their love of hard problems, their love of the mission, and their commitment to impact. That is incredibly helpful in keeping everyone sort of working together against that North Star.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There have been <\/strong>a lot of layoffs in tech<\/strong><\/a> this year, just a lot of turnover in general. There are <\/strong>more at Spotify this week<\/strong><\/a>, as we\u2019re talking. Is that a new pool of applicants or talent for you to go mine? Are you seeing that there\u2019s more interest in government work now?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We have definitely had more applicants this year than in any prior year. I think that\u2019s a function of several factors, frankly, some of what you led with, which is that this is becoming more of a thing and it\u2019s grown every year, but I\u2019m sure that factors into it. There are a lot of incredible people who are free agents now, so that\u2019s an unfortunate fact but also an opportunity for the government as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you\u2019re sitting with your talent team, do you say, \u201cOkay, <\/strong>Meta did it<\/strong><\/a>. There are a bunch of Meta people on the street. Let\u2019s go talk to them\u201d? Does that come up, or is that just more ambient?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There is one agency in the federal government, the Office of Personnel Management, and their job is to sort of help the entire government understand how to do hiring in the government way. They make up the rules, and we have worked with them at the end of last year and the beginning of this year to stand up sort of a function that is called Tech to Gov<\/a> that has pulled together lots of different agencies and has worked to build a common engagement model. We have job fairs where lots of agencies show up, and we have speakers, and people can go meet with people leaving. Tech companies can come and meet with agencies, learn about what they do, understand how it would work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think kicking off that initiative, for example, was motivated in part by just the significant availability in the market and the need and coupling those together. It just really felt like there was a moment to kick-start those types of efforts. I wouldn\u2019t say on a day-to-day basis. Like I said, we have 6,000 applications of people who are desperately wanting to come and work. So we do have recruiters, and we keep our eye on what\u2019s going on in the industry, but that is not our main focus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Other agencies often get criticized for having <\/strong>revolving doors<\/strong><\/a>, right? You go work for the thing that might regulate you or might compete with you in the case of the USDS, and then you go back to work for the companies. You\u2019ve had your own investments come under <\/strong>pretty harsh scrutiny<\/strong><\/a> because you had some waivers for conflicts of interest along the way. How do you manage those conflicts? Is that a concern of yours?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We are very careful to ensure that folks who come in who have specific interests don\u2019t get into a position that would even have the appearance of impropriety, let alone actually have any influence. I do think there\u2019s a real tension to grapple with, as you know, the tech industry and a lot of companies now pay with equity<\/a>, and the model of compensation in the world has shifted, and the government ethics regulations, I think, need to catch up and figure out how to think about that because you want people who have expertise in a seat. Figuring out what is truly competitive and what is not, I think there\u2019s an opportunity there, but we\u2019re extremely careful about it because, as you say, I think it would be totally not worth it for anyone to even perceive that that was an issue. This is just such important work to be undertaking.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let\u2019s talk about that work. You mentioned how big the government is, how many needs there are. This is the classic Decoder<\/em> question. You have to prioritize where your teams are going to go. How do you make decisions? What\u2019s your framework?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s the \u201chow do you decide what projects\u201d framework, and then there\u2019s their general framework. There are so many problems to take on. There\u2019s so much work inbound. I am lucky in that it is not exclusively me. We have other stakeholders who engage in that. I work very closely with the leadership of the Office of Management and Budget<\/a>, which is the part of the White House in which we sit, and also with the chief of staff\u2019s office at the White House to triage and evaluate the impact of opportunities. Ultimately, we\u2019re extremely focused on, \u201cWhere can we go that will have the greatest impact as determined by what will have the greatest impact for the most people in the most significant need?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That is a combination of: Is this the right type of project for USDS? Does it have a technology component? Is there a need for our skillset? It is those impact metrics, And there is also a component of long-term change. Our impact can be greater if the agency is near a tipping point, where they can move to a place where, over the long term, they will start taking on more of these problems in a different way. We\u2019re also evaluating how ready the agency is to do things differently. Sometimes, there\u2019s no chance. Sometimes, even if the agency is not quite ready to think about things differently, you have to go do the work because it\u2019s so critical. But we definitely\u2026 that is an important factor for us as well.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Does Joe Biden ever send you a screenshot of some horrible agency website and just be like, \u201cFix it\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not him personally, but the chief of staff definitely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jeff Bezos famously <\/strong>just sends question mark emails<\/strong><\/a> to his deputies. Does that come down from the chief of staff for the White House? Like, \u201cThis is broken, and we need to fix it.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s less frequent that we would get a screenshot and more frequent that we would get a letter from a constituent or a letter from a user. It\u2019s more like you get tickets, and the way that people submit tickets to leadership in this context is you write a letter to the White House or to the president. We have engaged in significant work at the Department of Veterans Affairs<\/a> over the last nine years. And it\u2019s some combination of letters and engagement from constituents, letters that go to the Hill that then come to the White House, and frankly, media. I will also sometimes get a news story that says, \u201cIs this really this big of a problem, and how do we fix it?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We have been engaged at the Department of Veterans Affairs for the last nine years. At the beginning of that time, the VA website helped you understand who was the secretary of the VA and what is the structure of the VA. And who cares? Not any consumer who\u2019s like, \u201cWhere is my claim? How do I make an appointment with my doctor? Which facility are they actually in when I\u2019m going to see my doctor?\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 real transactional questions that any normal consumer would have. This was at the same time as there were a variety\u2026 the VA was sort of in crisis. They were having trouble scheduling veterans. There were a lot of challenges with data coming over from the DOD and people figuring out where their benefits claims were and their benefit appeals were. And so we got a lot of inbound on those topics, and it helped us really identify areas to prioritize what the biggest pain points were.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Because it was clear that we needed to have a wholesale transformation of how that agency thought about integrating all these services. But you\u2019ve got to start somewhere. In part, those are really helpful for prioritizing, both that we needed to focus on issues at the VA and then also which of those issues to take on first, so we started that work. Initially, we launched a compendium site, a beta site, that was called vets.gov. It was different from the VA website. It only handled a couple of the things that you needed to do, but it was the place that we could direct you to do your benefit appeals. And then over time built out the functionalities of that, eventually moved that to be the main site. Now, if you go to va.gov, it\u2019s very transactional-oriented. It\u2019s like, \u201cHow can we serve you? What do you need to do? What are you trying to do?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And then, more recently, [we] have additionally supported the VA in building out their own mobile app, which, as your demographic will understand, building an app is the thing that executives are always like, \u201cShould we have an app?\u201d And you\u2019re like, \u201cOh.\u201d Your bar has to be incredibly high before you decide. But similarly, we got a lot of user feedback. We looked at the functionality really hard. The CTO there is a former USDS-er, and he\u2019s incredible. And ultimately, they decided it was worth the investment and critically important. Now, it has over half a million monthly actives. It has over a million users. It\u2019s like 4.8 stars in the app store. I think [it has] something like 100,000 five-star reviews. Looking back at where everything was nine years ago, it is impossible to imagine that that is where we are now. But that is what agency transformation looks like.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And it shows. In that time, trust metrics across the VA \u2014 which is not exclusively due to their digital experience, but by the way, in the process of integrating those on the front end, you also have to build out your business processes and figure out how to make those more seamless \u2014 has gone up by 20 points. And that\u2019s huge for a critical demographic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is an amazing example because there are layers upon layers here, and we can just go through them. The first one is, \u201cBoy, there\u2019s a bunch of old computer systems and databases that need to get integrated so that you can use a website to process a claim with a hospital and talk to the DOD.\u201d That just seems intractable. At any company, you\u2019re like, \u201cWe have five different databases. One of them is run on COBOL. Fix it.\u201d It\u2019s already intractable. Our company is trying to migrate to WordPress, it\u2019s intractable. Even that piece of it is hard.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Then there\u2019s, \u201cWe need to build some front-end user experiences to replace our, like, \u2018Here\u2019s a picture of the secretary and a phone number for the main contact line\u2019 into an application that you can transact with and that is reliable.\u201d And then there\u2019s, \u201cWe\u2019re going to care about ratings and reviews in the app store,\u201d which is all the way down the line.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The first part of it, just that we\u2019re going to bring all the databases together. Did you just set a team on that and tell the VA, \u201cGet out of our way. We\u2019re going to fix it\u201d? Or did they have a team? How did that work?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Oh, I love this question. No, I mean, we don\u2019t do anything that is not in deep partnership with a bunch of different partners. We are 230 people; at that time, I think we were 60 or 80 people. But the VA has a huge IT department of their own and a huge operations and customer service department of their own. And most of the build work across government, almost all of the build work across government, is done by contractors<\/a>. There\u2019s also a procurement shop at the VA that is letting contracts to vendors to build all these capabilities, to update the databases, to do the user research, and build the front end. We deploy small teams; you would not believe how small on some level the team can be. But a dozen people to go and help the agency really strategize \u201cWhat is our roadmap?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You said unifying all the databases. I\u2019m sure all of your listeners are like, \u201cHere\u2019s what we should never do.\u201d Just like a database unification project that has no\u2026 those never go well. You have to figure out what use cases are you going to focus on fixing first. A lot of our initial work is getting everyone around the table to look at the data on what users are doing, where we\u2019re getting stuck, what are the bottlenecks, and decide what problems we want to take on first. It takes\u2026 you eat the elephant one bite at a time. And all through that, we are working closely with the existing tech teams. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n So some of this is bringing in the executives, the existing tech teams that are focused on those parts of the experience, the procurement folks, the contractors, and helping everybody shift what their objectives are: how they work together; how we make this more closed loop so that let\u2019s adjust our methodology to say that the outcomes and some types of user ratings should factor in to how contractors are evaluated, which will change how they decide to do their user research and change how they decide to do their monitoring. Let\u2019s build a process where we start to look at the Google Analytics from utilization, and that builds into how we prioritize next things. Oh, first we have to put in Google Analytics so we can do that. It\u2019s a very centralized\u2026 How do we help catalyze all of these partners to work together in concert? Our goal is not\u2026 we very rarely hands-on keyboard build the app. Well, really any of it. We spend most of our time with a combination. There are very real technical problems, but a lot of nontechnical problems, too. And it\u2019s really, \u201cHow do you catalyze all these partners to work together?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The work is done by the contractors, and we\u2019re here to help the agency figure out how to most effectively draw the roadmap, prioritize the work, manage the technical roadmap, and also the product roadmap. How do you build that into the contracts and all of that? It\u2019s a very highly leveraged model in that way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a real tendency to take technology for granted, to believe that you can just sort of deploy it, or that it will continue running, or that you don\u2019t need to update it once you have it. I can see that in the government maybe most of all, particularly when I listen to our elected officials, that you can just wave your hand at technology and make it go. Something like the VA. You get the VA wrong, people don\u2019t win reelection. There\u2019s a lot of political pressure around a process like that to make it better instantly. How do you manage the pressure that comes with people taking it for granted or demanding a quick fix against, \u201cOkay, we have to do this invisible, very difficult database migration in order to get to the place that you want\u201d?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s one of the tremendous challenges. You\u2019re hitting on the head a couple of the fundamental issues that we try and work with agencies, but stakeholders across the board, to sort through, but some of them are some of the immovable objects. So one, you asked, \u201cWhat do product managers do?\u201d The desire for new quick hits and to do something new in government rather than fixing what\u2019s old is huge. And as any product-driven company would tell you, if you just keep launching new things, that\u2019s not the right way to satisfy your users in a lot of different ways. Figuring out how you\u2019re going to knit those together, it gets confusing. You get proliferation, and as you said, it means you\u2019re not paying enough attention to your legacy products.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think we\u2019re having the conversation now, which is incredibly important. I helped write a paper a few years ago for the Defense Innovation Board, the title of which ended up being \u201cSoftware Is Never Done<\/a>,\u201d which is basically like, \u201cStop thinking that you build it and then you put it on an operations and maintenance contract, and you never have to modify it again.\u201d That\u2019s a real good way to waste a lot of money over time. The conversation is there, and I think the executives who are moving into leadership positions in agencies are beginning to have more experience in managing ongoing investment in operations and IT. But the way government budgeting works, it is challenging, and this is one of the key things that we are constantly working on, that we\u2019re working with our colleagues at the Office of Management and Budget about, right? How do we structure this budget to make sure that we can have the right degree of investment over time? It\u2019s a real challenge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s also just the general politics of it. The Obama administration created this agency. Trump cut the budget, Biden <\/strong>raised the budget<\/strong><\/a>. The Congressional Republicans, if they accomplish anything, they will <\/strong>cut the budget<\/strong><\/a>. There\u2019s an election coming. Who knows what will happen? How do you manage through that? Do you assume that there\u2019ll be some fixed number you can work with, and then you\u2019ll have an increase or decrease, or are you just waiting to see what happens?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You mean for USDS, or do you mean for an agency that is trying to deliver services in a consistent fashion despite fluctuating budgets?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It sounds like the same problem across the board, but for USDS?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think USDS has, to a certain extent, more flexibility. We have a lot of demand, and I think we\u2019re highly leveraged when we go into an agency. We help them become more efficient and more effective. At the end of the day, I think USDS can scale up and down and just take on more and less programs depending on the priorities across the board.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you see your job as political? Do you go meet with various congressional leaders and whoever else and prove the point that this is valuable, or are you insulated from that?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We definitely do. Ultimately, our budget comes from Congress, and just like any startup CEO, part of my job is to go explain what our ROI is and show\u2014<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you do the graphs that are up and to the right forever? You\u2019re like, \u201cHere\u2019s the hockey stick\u201d to [Utah Senator] <\/strong>Mike Lee<\/strong><\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No. [Laughs<\/em>] I was trying to think of a funny thing to say about that, but I don\u2019t even like… I guess the thing I could do that with is the number of inbound requests we get, which does have some of that feature.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So what\u2019s your sell? You go meet with some Democratic or Republican senator, [and] you\u2019re like, \u201cHey, it\u2019s budget time. Here\u2019s our number of inbound requests from across the government. Here\u2019s the new SAA.gov, here\u2019s the new VA.gov, here\u2019s the new FAFSA form. Here\u2019s the stuff we make. Look at how good it is and how much more of it people want.\u201d Is that the sell to the rest of the government?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s, \u201cLook at how good it is.\u201d It\u2019s, frankly, continuing to invest in your technology has a bunch of benefits, and doing it intelligently. So one, we help agencies more effectively manage how they spend on technology. I\u2019ll be honest, as you know, in my private sector life, I had lots of contracts, too. It takes a high degree of expertise to effectively manage contracts to get what you want, so we help agencies figure out how to most effectively spend their money and use their money. And a tech roadmap that is thoughtful is obviously much more cost-effective than one that has a little bit less expertise in it. So I think there\u2019s a cost-effectiveness piece.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s also a broader cost-effectiveness opportunity, which is, part of technology is to make us all more productive. One of the huge drivers of cost at a lot of agencies is a very large number of calls to the call center, for example, or people processing things where we have a backlog<\/a>. And I think those are political issues. You have a backlog of claims<\/a>, that\u2019s a problem. And one of the ways that you accelerate that is by making all of those claims processors more effective and helping them be more efficient about processing those claims. So I think there are multiple pieces where technology is helpful, and we are one of the most effective instruments of making technology more effective in government, both in a user-facing way and a back-end way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So I want to bring all these threads together, so this is a perfect segue. A thing that I think about a lot is we\u2019ve talked about product managers and user research and all this stuff. If you go to a young person, and you\u2019re like, \u201cThe fastest way to get what you want is open this app, and the app is good and it\u2019ll be effective and you can just push some buttons.\u201d Most young people are very digitally native now, they\u2019re like, \u201cGreat, I don\u2019t want to talk to a person. I don\u2019t even want to make a phone call. I will just figure out the metaphors embedded in this user interface, and I\u2019ll get what I want done.\u201d And the kids know how to use Snapchat. The greatest example of \u201cI will navigate this bizarre user experience to get what I want,\u201d and that thing is a success.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n