Nathan Parker
‘Ignore the Stated Power Structure and Just Figure Out Who Knows Stuff’: Nathan Parker on Maximizing Impact within Government
| Nathan Parker joined the U.S. Digital Service for multiple short periods, providing technical support on urgent projects like stabilizing HealthCare.gov. He came to the White House from Google. |
Nathan Parker’s first deployment within the U.S. Digital Service was just 11 weeks long, but the experience motivated him to return for future stints — and to stay connected to the community even after returning to industry.
Nathan worked on a range of projects within the federal government, from education issues to HealthCare.gov. At the time, Nathan viewed the work through a project lens: solving the near term problems, and meeting the project goals. But after exiting government and putting distance between him and projects, he had a greater appreciation for the larger mission — like providing millions of Americans with healthcare.
Below, Nathan discusses the importance of making allies, conflicting narratives about “saving” HealthCare.gov, and setting up technology infrastructure within the government.
June 27, 2019
Kathy Pham:
Nathan, what was your journey to USDS?
Nathan:
When Mikey described it to me, it sounded interesting but not for me. “I have this job at Google. Why would I go work for the government?” To me, the government was this thing I paid taxes to and provided services, but I didn’t have much faith in it. That was shared among a lot of my peers. When I decided to go, I got several reactions from people at Google like, “That sounds like a total waste of time.”
After Mikey’s pitch, I was invited to a round table recruiting event in D.C. I didn’t know what to expect. President Obama walked in and sat down with us for a half hour. He described how this work was so important to his legacy and to Obamacare. He explained that we could not deliver on the goals of the government if we didn’t have functioning technology. He said, “I need your help to make this happen.”
The star power certainly helped, but also the fact that it was a very high priority for him specifically. This wasn’t a ragtag group of tech people trying to infiltrate the government where everybody’s got this idealistic view about saving the world. This was being pulled in. There was somebody at the highest place in government saying, “I am going to give you the power to do very useful things.” That was the clincher for me — it was far more probable of having success because it had support all the way up.
It also mattered that we had the right group of people. I knew Mikey and I trusted him in terms of his very practical sense of leading projects and reading people.
Kathy:
What did it feel like when you arrived in D.C. for those first days and weeks?
Nathan:
It was fairly foreign to me. I’d never lived alone and I was leaving my family behind. I was going from being very busy at work and at home to suddenly living alone and not knowing anybody. Then when I arrived at Jackson Place, it wasn’t lined up properly. There were various glitches, so I actually was not officially employed for two weeks. People at Jackson Place made me feel at home and brought me along where they could.
Kathy:
What was the feeling when you met everyone?
Nathan:
It was very exciting— a brand new thing. People were super gung-ho, like this was what they’ve been waiting for. They had been wishing for this to happen for years and that energy pulled me along.
Kathy:
And there were Googlers there, right?
Nathan:
Yeah. That was definitely helpful to me. They felt like my peers.
Kathy:
Another important piece of this is understanding what it takes to do technical work in government, like your work on HealthCare.gov and the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard.
Nathan:
I started on the college ranking project my second week. There were a handful of meetings to scope out the problem. I found it confusing just figuring out who to talk to and who’s in charge. I picked up on a lot of existing politics and relationships between the different groups there and I thought, “Is it my job to navigate this?” In my time at USDS I learned to ignore the stated power structure, just figure out who knows stuff, and then elevate them to do something useful.
There’s some person who’s got the skills and the knowledge, but they’re often buried or held up. I figured out this was a play I could use. For HealthCare.gov, it was about finding that person and flying the White House flag, saying, “I have a little bit of authority through USDS, and you should listen to this person and get out of their way.”
Kathy:
That theme comes up over and over again: There’s the stated structure, and then there’s finding the org chart and talking to engineers and designers and others who actually know stuff. When you rolled off the college scorecard project, where did you go next?
Nathan:
Mikey wanted me to spend a lot more time on HealthCare.gov and at the Exchange Operations Center (XOC). There was an open enrollment deadline. Mikey said, “This is the top priority.”
On another note, I built trust with all the different contractors on HealthCare.gov. They needed a site reliability engineering (SRE) team; they needed a group of people who were very technically skilled and organizationally empowered to give direction and fix things. But it took some time to build trust.
Kathy:
How did you do that?
Nathan:
Spending the time talking to people, and not just coming in and suddenly giving direction. Getting to know people, hanging out with people, going out to lunch, going out to dinner. There was a lot of skepticism or suspicion amongst the different contracting companies working on HealthCare.gov. They had pieces they owned and thought, “I want to make sure somebody’s not encroaching on my part.” I was making sure I was seen as helping everybody.
Kathy:
We’re like mediators in some ways. In other agencies later on, people even did brown bags: “If you want to learn a skill I have…” There were all these little things people did to say, “I’m not here to sell you anything or screw you over, just to be partners and share some ideas.”
Nathan:
Right. Making it clear I didn’t have some tricky agenda. But there were some challenges. David Nesting and I tried to inject techniques from Google that we found useful, specifically around postmortems. When something goes wrong, it’s a whole process to improve the system. They had a process, but it was totally broken and had a punitive effect if you screw up — a whole lot of paperwork to do. There was some wrestling with people to get them out of that mode. There was a little bit of a power struggle; people had an attachment to that process for some reason.
Kathy:
It’s interesting to see what people get attached to, whether it’s because of their contracts and getting paid or just being territorial.
Nathan:
I saw a whole lot of risk aversion. People thought, “I can do a mediocre job and I won’t get fired as long as I don’t step out of my lane.” Trying to get people to change that was often hard.
Kathy:
Do you think people changed?
Nathan:
I don’t know. There were various processes that did change in a better direction. One culture shift was the idea of SREs as a skilled and empowered group of people in the center of a technical project. That didn’t really exist before. Mostly because people weren’t empowered to do so, but also because they didn’t necessarily have the skills. They had a very small scope of things they could do. It was like, “Let’s get some people and call them SREs and then we’re done.” Instead, we needed people to have root access at a bunch of places so they could go fix things. By the time I left, we had a team of three or four people that could do that.
Kathy:
That idea of “Let’s call some people SREs and then we’re done” is so common. “Let’s call it user experience testing and then check the box of user experience testing. Let’s call something end-to-end testing and then check that box and we’re done.” There are so many stories of government calling something a thing and then saying, “We did it.”
I teach a class on technical terms and how to call them out when people are not using them right. When they say they have an SRE, when they say they’re doing a postmortem, when they say they’re doing end-to-end testing, when they call something agile — what exactly are they doing? Because the government tends to have its own definitions.
Nathan, how did you wrap up the HealthCare.gov piece?
Nathan:
I had an agreement with Google for three months. When I left, it was just after open enrollment and things were still very busy, but we had gotten through the big part of it. And there were enough people in the previous couple of weeks who had come online at XOC to take over. I felt pretty confident that it wouldn’t drop. I mentioned that I wanted to stay involved; that this was an awesome group of people that are super energizing, and I wanted to continue to be a part of it. My agreement with Jennifer Anastasoff was I could do remote work on hiring, reviewing resumes, and interviews, because that seemed flexible.
Six months or a year later, Todd Park took me to coffee and tried to recruit me again. He was trying to get people back in. So I did the two-week stint for the Defense Digital Service in 2016 in Aurora, Colorado. OCX was the project.
Kathy:
What made you decide to do that?
Nathan:
Matthew Weaver can be convincing. Also the fact that it was time bounded and relatively short. I appreciated the value that the three months at USDS had. It opened up my view of the world and how things work. And now, I could go see the whole world of defense contracting, which was super fascinating.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a part of USDS: I wasn’t going to Jackson Place, I wasn’t going to see all the same people. It was a different group.
Kathy:
What was it like to come out for just two weeks?
Nathan:
There wasn’t any pre-existing structure to that team – We just flew in and met each other in a hotel and got to work. Several of us had to work hard to get sufficient security clearance. But I think we had a positive impact there. We talked to many layers of their org structure, spotted some places where their dev/testing/ops processes were stuck, and made recommendations to the senior leadership who were receptive.
Kathy:
Nathan, what are you the most proud of? Or what did you do that left a foundation for USDS?
Nathan:
I am proud of what HealthCare.gov does for people. That mission I didn’t appreciate until later. When I was there, it was a system that I had to solve. But afterwards it was clear: “This is really helping individuals get healthcare who could not before.” I got a little bit of that when Obama called in the night before open enrollment and gave a pep talk to everybody involved, and shared stories about individuals. I thought, “Oh, this is really helping individual citizens.” That was empowering after the fact.
In terms of what I accomplished, I struggle with that sometimes. I have imposter syndrome about a number of things and I feel like I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t actually do any good. Sometimes I think about that SRE team — making sure that they were positioned in the right spot to help in the future — and that does feel like an accomplishment.
Kathy:
It’s a huge accomplishment. Those of you there in the early days made it possible and normal to do what we did later. You made it okay for subsequent people to try and do similar things in other places. It left a core foundation for how we continue to operate.
Nathan:
It’s hard to see from my point of view. When I was there, it seemed like things were very inefficient and my productivity was terrible, because I was trying to learn and find where I could provide value and so forth. It was hard to see that we were also building a culture or a playbook for others to follow.
One other piece I’m proud of is what I learned, what I saw, and how much value there is in having people from industry come into government and try to modernize things. That story resonated with a lot of people.
Kathy:
Nathan, thank you so much.