Building the prototype that wins the contract, before a line of code gets written

Situation

Federal agencies don't sign a contract on a pitch deck. Every engagement starts the same way: prove the idea works before anyone commits real budget to it, on a clock measured in days, not quarters. Years later, the company faced a different version of the same problem internally, "make the company AI-native" is a slogan until 1,500 employees have an actual path to act on it.

Approach

Discovery is the company's answer to the first problem: a 10-day sprint, stakeholder interviews, and a modified Scrum process that ends in a working concept prototype instead of a slide deck. Ten days isn't enough time for real end-user access, so we lean on proxy users instead, a real constraint, not a flex, and design around it rather than pretend it isn't there. I've contributed to four of those prototypes, each one a full concept dashboard built in Figma and Mural for a different federal problem.

Leadership & AI Strategy

The AI problem needed a different kind of prototype: a curriculum. I manage Agile Defense University, built on the company's own AI Learning → AI Leaning → AI Leading adoption framework, co-authored by our Chief Experience Officer and President. My team and I draft storyboards, write and validate scripts, then update the storyboards to match before anything moves into production, the same repeatable pattern we're now using to build out the rest of ADU. The goal: every employee knows exactly where they stand on their career path and has something they can act on immediately, at whatever speed makes sense for them. Good for the employee, and it scales the company's AI fluency without a training department that grows headcount every time the curriculum does.

I also manage Experience Studio, the four-person design team behind this work, co-led the Labs project management office for six months during a post-acquisition reorg (reorgs are never as clean as the org chart makes them look), and built Fast Play, a template-and-AI-agent system that grew out of our internal methods wiki so any employee can run a workshop without needing deep facilitation experience.

Outcome

Four concept prototypes gave federal clients something to react to before signing anything, real screens, real data, real decisions about what leadership actually needs to see first. ADU is now teaching 1,500 employees the same discovery-first thinking, at company scale.

• 4 federal concept dashboards designed and shipped through Discovery
• 1,500+ employees reached through Agile Defense University
• 4-person design team managed through Experience Studio
• Fast Play saves hours per workshop by replacing ad hoc facilitation with a template any employee can run