Kim Rachmeler
‘This Might Be Your Opportunity for Public Service’: Kim Rachmeler on her First Days of the U.S. Digital Service
| Kim Rachmeler was a Digital Services Expert at the U.S. Digital Service from May 2015 to January 2017, and served as the first Director of Engineering. Prior, she spent a decade at Amazon, helping build it from the ground up and holding several vice president positions. Kim earned two degrees in electrical engineering at Stanford. |
Seven years into Kim Rachmeler’s retirement, her phone rang; an old colleague was on the other end, eager to discuss public service. Less than a year later, Kim was on her way to Washington, DC to help stand up the newly-formed United States Digital Service (USDS).
Kim helped confront many of the challenges the early U.S. Digital Service faced: Where to apply their expertise, who to hire, and how to navigate the tension between public sector and tech sector norms. Below, Kim speaks about those early days, building an engineering community of practice, and more.
June 7, 2019
Emily Tavoulareas:
What was your journey to the U.S. Digital Service like?
Kim Rachmeler:
In the summer of 2014, I got a call from somebody that I hadn’t heard from in a decade or more, Eric Maland saying, “Can we have coffee?”
So we have coffee and Ellen Ratajak comes along, too. Eric explains that he’s moving to DC and that he’s going to help out the healthcare.gov people. I had known about the rescue of healthcare.gov, but little more than that. He wanted to talk to me because he thought that I was good at getting people to do things who didn’t report to me, and he wanted to know how to do that. And so I did a brain dump and went, “So glad you’re doing that, bye.” And off he went. That was about July.
And then in November I got a call from Ellen saying, “Hi, I’m moving to DC. I’m going to go help out the VA.” And I think, “What in God’s name is going on here?” Because Ellen had been retired longer than I had. Later she said, “You’re going to have to forgive me, but I gave your name to some people and they might be coming out to Seattle. If they do, would you talk to them?” And I reply, “Sure, I’ll talk to anybody. I’m made of time.”
So in January Todd Park, Jennifer Anastasoff, and Brian Lefler and others had a meeting at Seattle’s Town Hall. It was like a reunion; it was fantastic. How are you? and I haven’t seen you in 10 years! and How are you doing?
We’re all milling about and then Todd explains what the USDS is trying to do. It’s trying to make government better at software development in order to improve the services it offers citizens.
As he’s talking, I’m strangely intrigued. I hear my father’s voice in my ear saying, This might be your chance. This might be your opportunity for public service, to use the skills that you have gained over an entire career and contribute to society. My dad was always really big on the notion of two years of public service. And coming from a guy who spent 34 years in the military, he’s like, “No, it doesn’t have to be in the military, but it should be something because everybody would have skin in the game and that would be good for the country.”
At that point, I had been retired for about seven and a half years. I had been talking to a local organization called ADA Developers Academy about possibly being their managing director. It’s a bootcamp for women to learn to be software developers. But instead of being six weeks or eight weeks, it’s a year long program and it’s tuition-free because every slot is sponsored by a company. Women spend seven months in class and five months in internships, and at the end of the year can get software development jobs.
But after hearing Todd and not sleeping for three nights, I thought, I’m really going to regret it if I don’t pitch in on this. That was in mid-March, and this was after the group of us had come out to visit in DC. We came together in a big group and I said, “Okay, we should do this.” In the beginning of May I was actually able to start. That’s how I landed in DC.
Kathy Pham:
I remember when you all came to visit, and it makes me smile. I remember being in the basement with Eric Benson talking about the VA architecture diagram.
Kim:
And so I sold my car and my dog walker Richard moved into my house to take care of my dogs and run his business. I went out to DC and rented an apartment and then the Bensons joined me about six weeks later. We found a townhouse together and we were in that for another six or eight months.
My first day was a Monday and I arrived on a Friday, so I had the weekend to myself. Ginny Hunt had been assigned to help me get oriented, and that was enormously helpful. I walked about 40,000 steps that weekend. I walked from the Mall through Arlington into Fort Meyer to see where I had lived in high school. My dad was stationed at the Pentagon at that time, and we lived on Fort Meyer. That was a blast from the past.
Kathy:
Can you talk about what you did once you started?
Kim:
I was the first Director of the Engineering Community of Practice, a role I took on in August 2015 after I joined in May 2015. That was ongoing in the background regardless of whatever else I was doing.
In the beginning of July 2015, we decided to do a sprint with the Department of Justice. This was something that Roy Austin in the Domestic Policy Council knew really, really well. And so I said, “Sure, we can do that.” After wading through travel and organization bureaucracy, we did the sprint and it went pretty well. We put a set of recommendations together based on our observations and gave that to our DoJ colleagues, who were tremendously supportive and cooperative.
In late August, Mikey Dickerson had a meeting with President Obama and asked what his priorities were. That kicked off our engagement with the IRS.
In addition to the work with Agencies, we created Communities of Practice (COP) across disciplines, where I was the first Director of the Engineering COP. To build the COP, I thought: What things could be done in the community of practice? What value could we add to this group of people? I thought a big part of the value was determining that you’re not alone, that it’s not just you, that this is a very weird environment and that there are lessons to be learned from the people who were scattered about. By sharing those stories, we could increase the level of competence in the group, because they would get the benefit of hearing these things before they ran into them themselves at their own agencies. And, there would be a sense of solidarity among the team because of the sharing; we would get some degree of familiarity with one another because for example you might know Matthew Weaver’s name, but you wouldn’t really know Weaver unless you had been out on one of these adventures with him. Having him talk about what it was like to run into the burning building was a very useful thing that wouldn’t happen outside of the community of practice.
So that’s how that worked: The experience at the community of practice meetings was storytelling.
Emily:
Can you talk more about leading both an agency team and a community of practice?
Kim:
The open question at the time was, do you have enough time in the day to be both Community of Practice (COP) Lead and Agency Lead? And can somebody do both and are there different characteristics necessary for one versus the other?
I do believe there are different characteristics needed. If you’re going to be the COP lead, then you would like to offer something in the way of experience to folks who are in that community. You want to be good at organizing, you want to be good at pulling together groups. You want to be supportive because that’s one of the major contributions is to have this far-flung group of people feel like there are some people who have their back.
With respect to agency lead, it’s a very different world. You want someone there who is experienced at execution, someone who is potentially much more senior in terms of who they are capable of dealing with. You would want to have someone in that role who has a wide variety of executing in different organizations and organizational styles. Someone who can speak to high-level executives, someone who is persuasive. And again, somebody who brings something unique to the table, something that the agency cannot get otherwise, because otherwise if you don’t, then you’re just another checkbox.
Kathy:
Thank you for sharing your perspectives as both an Agency Lead and Community of Practice Lead. Being part of both the Engineering and Product COPs, I know your leadership left a lasting positive impact on how the COPs served as a place for storytelling and camaraderie.