Fed to Fed Podcast - A Conversation with Coforma's Eduardo Ortiz and Ashleigh Axios

How do we make intentional decisions leading to the change we want to see in the world and the spaces in which we interact? How can a company adjust their processes to better partner with government clients and serve the public interest? What can government bring to the conversation to gain more value from industry partnerships?

Delve into these questions and more as GOVTECH CONNECTS CEO Susan Sharer chats with Eduardo Ortiz and Ashleigh Axios from digital services company Coforma.

About today's guests:

Eduardo F. Ortiz
Eduardo F. Ortiz is CEO and a founding co-owner at Coforma, a digital services firm that crafts creative technology solutions that help people live better lives. He is a combat Veteran who served in the United States Marine Corps and several civilian agencies. Eduardo is passionate about leveraging product and technology practices to remove points of friction that prevent people from accessing critical services. This passion has driven his professional journey from a software engineer and product strategist to entrepreneurship. He holds an MBA from the University of Maryland. Eduardo lives in Maryland with his wife, son, and two dogs.

Ashleigh Axios
Ashleigh Axios is a speaker, strategic creative, and an advocate for design's ability to break barriers and create positive social change. She is Chief Operating Officer and an owner of Coforma, a digital consultancy and design firm that crafts creative solutions and builds technology products that support communities. She is also a term trustee of the board of directors to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Prior to her current roles, Axios formed and led the in-house creative agency at Automattic, served as the creative director and a digital strategist in the Obama White House, separately served as president of AIGA and of AIGA Washington D.C., and more.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Fed to Fed podcast, where we dive into the dynamic world of government technology. In this podcast series will be joined by current and former federal leaders and industry trailblazers who are at the forefront of innovation. Here we speak openly and honestly about the challenges and opportunities facing the federal government and the Department of Defense and its partners in the modern age, driving innovation and the incredible capabilities of technology along the way. Whether you're a federal leader, a tech industry professional, or simply fascinated by I.T. modernization, just like us, this podcast is for you, and we're so happy to have you tuning in. Today, we have two truly exceptional guests with us from the Digital services company Coforma. Eduardo Ortiz, Conforma’s Chief Executive Officer, and Ashley Axios, Coforma’s Chief Operating Officer. We talked about Coforma’s modern, agile, user centered approach that elevates human needs through thoughtfully designed systems and products. We also talked about recommendations and strategies for government and their vision for the future. Here's our conversation. Eduardo and Ashley, welcome to the Fed to Fed podcast. We're thrilled to have you here. I'd like to start with our first question and chat about Coforma’s Tagline“Impactful by Design.” Tell us more about the tagline Your Passion, your mission, and the focus, you are driving on behalf of your organization. I love that question primarily because it allows us to get into the definition of design and design as we define it. I guess we often speak to it is about making decisions and our tagline specifically addresses that by using lowercase design and saying we are impactful by design, we are impactful because we evaluate that. We make the decisions that need to be made in order to make the change that we want to see in the world and in the spaces in which we interact. From the day that I launched their organization in 2017 and through its many evolutions, including actually joining in 2019 and then our rebranding to Coforma, we've been very intentional as to what it is that we do, how it is that we do it, and why do we do it, and in the spaces in which we do it. And that ultimately is what makes us who we are as we attempt to be very thoughtful about the work that we do and the impact that we bring into the world. So, Eduardo, as a follow on to that question, tell us more about the work Coforma’s leading and the impact your organization is making to help move the needle for government agencies? We are a full services digital firm. We work with organizations in order to help them provide better services to the constituencies that that they themselves serve. We do that across the commercial space, the nonprofit space, as well as governments. And we go there's impact to be to be had. For us, that impact is across the three major focus areas. That is better services, health care, and then public interest. Public interest is that umbrella that is meant to enable us to work in areas that are truly making a difference for people. This is from working with the Office of Personnel Management in order to modernize the systems by which federal employees are able to retire and manage their annuities to the systems that are utilized by people trying to access information related to services that a state should be providing them. But some of the work that we did at the onset of the pandemic with the state of North Carolina in support of the Charlotte Center for Legal Aid and Legal Aid of North Carolina and overall, it's about just bringing the right approach to solve the problem that whatever that problem, maybe you will often hear us speaking about the double diamond and about designing things right, but most importantly, designing the right thing. So about making those those right decisions. Yeah, that's excellent. So, Ashley, tell me more about the double diamond and tell me more about your impactful work you're doing not only in design but focused on digital transformation technology, all the people involved. Yeah, absolutely. So beautiful thing about the double diamond is that includes all of our kind of services, our practice areas, and it's cross-disciplinary in nature. So it's not I think you're hearing designing the right thing that, maybe our researchers are just doing that work to figure out what the right thing is. And we take an approach that includes our product management team, our engineering team, strategists, content designers, all in this process so that everybody who's involved in that Second diamond of creating the solution is really informed with the knowledge of what the problem is deeply that that's validated, that's been synthesized, and they're doing that in deep partnership with our clients and any other partners in that project. So it's critical to us when we're talking about innovation and especially the spaces that we work in, that we're working in deep partnership. Eduardo has done a great job embedding this even before we kind of rebranded to Coforma, you know, then and Partners had partnership in the brand name to make sure that we're we're able to embed deeply and not be. And fortunately this happens fairly frequently the type of growth, something over the fence proposal consultant right. That is the “Beltway bandit” that is kind of rampant across the D.C. area because that is not, in our belief, an effective way to make change and to make lasting technology changes, especially it takes a deep understanding of the issues that are affecting the agency administrators and the people who are implementing the policies, as well as a deep understanding of the needs of the audiences who are being served by those products and technologies and the broader community. So that's a huge part of the approach that we take in working with others and it as you can probably hear in my answer, the technology part comes after it's, you know, people process technology. We focus on those human needs and are really human centered in our approach, and that spans far beyond our design team. I'd be remiss if I didn't plug our new vision statement, too. I think it just underlines the wonderful things that Eduardo has already stated and really helping emphasize what we're about as a company. We're uncovering the insights needed to create products and services that undeniably improve our world, and we're really excited about moving forward, especially as we have more time under our belt as a business to be able to share those lasting impacts and improvements that we've been a part of making, not just outcomes of a project and deliverables that have, you know, tech gone off and positive CPARs and stuff that, you know, in some ways easier marks to make. But really those long lasting, those things that sometimes take a decade to prove out. Did this have a positive impact on the community? Has this made it easier for veterans to get the medical services that they're seeking through this platform? Those are the things that take longer. They're really holding ourselves to moving forward as part of our standard. That's excellent. I have a follow on question So this takes time, right? You talked about the gift of time that it takes, probably takes a lot of education. Most people want a quick fix. I just want to make it work. I just want to get this done. Talk to me a little bit more about how you work with your customers, your partners, the people that you are working with to educate them on the process and talk through that. It might take that gift of time, or definitely it will take time to create that journey to get them where they want to go. So tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, that is hard. And the one thing that I've grown to understand is that it takes developing trust and it takes being vulnerable and being honest and actually bringing like a partnership approach to the work that you are doing in order to achieve those things that you want to achieve. I'll give you one example from the work that we did, I think about two years ago out of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, where we were helping to implement the No Surprises Act through research and the creation of artifacts that would help to the establishment of the operationalizing of this Congressional act by CMS. And we truly understanding what are the pain points that people have, what are the issues that they have, what needs to exist, what needs to be created, How this need to work to attempt to minimize harm takes time. But Congress is not an agile organization. They hand you an act and they tell you this is now law. Go ahead and implement it and you have this amount of days to do so, and then everyone else has to act against it. And initially, when we partner with CMS, we're like, Well, it is going to take this amount of time to do this, and then this process takes this amount of time and then this amount of time. And it was very, very rigid process. And as we started to work with them, we understood the constraints that they were working with and together we were able to basically modify the approach that we had originally planned for, to make it thoughtful enough to start gaining those insights and to start being able to achieve some of the goals that they had while retaining some of the rigidity and the thoroughness that we needed to make sure that whatever what was being put out into the world was the right thing. And by the end of the engagement, we had succeeded not based by our standards, but based on CMS standards, because they were able to not just hit the their mandated deadlines, but also the engagement that they had with the products that were published clearly showed us that being nimble and partnering enabled a better outcome than having a very rigid process. So it all came down to how do we engender trust and what is it that needs to be done to achieve those things. And that is something that our leads on our teams do a lot of they spend a lot of time not telling, but showing their partners, their counterparts. Why is it that we need to be thoughtful about doing this thing? Why is it that we cannot just jump on a meeting and recorded and talk to someone and then take exactly what they say and then just apply it to a solution? Why do we need to ensure that we are very intentional about even the smallest of things like when we are in? Please, I am chairman here when we are like recruiting participants for our research effort, how do we make sure that the words that we use to say your information is not going to be shared it We will only use your name. We will only use your likeness. We will disambiguate the information that you gave us in order to prevent one from coming to you. Why does that matter? Oftentimes, that is not understood, especially when you are under pressure from a congressional act. But if we're able to work with you, then we're able to ensure that we have the right outcomes and avoid that unintended catch, whether we intend them or not. An unintended outcome is just that. Yeah, I think something else that's an important almost flip side of that coin and kind of educating customers on the process and the time it takes is as understanding the customers and sometimes especially some of the complicated ecosystems that we work within. That step is skipped or assumptions are made and just kind of run with that really prohibit the work from being done. If you just take what was provided in the, final scope of work with the contract and run with that and sort of understanding maybe the changing ecosystem and changing pressures on the customer and the number of stakeholders and customers and the ways in which we're accountable to them and they're responsible for different outcomes and marry those things together. We don't have that understanding. It's really hard to educate and to have a thoughtful partnership and to get to a solid solution that's going to be effective short term and long term. So really unpacking those pieces, that's been essential and we have wonderful people in our team who, you know, we say take that kind of human centered approach are really doing it in that client interaction and building understanding and making sure that, again, when they're ensuring that they're working on the right thing, it's not just the product, the technology, but also are we collectively on the same page about the challenges that we're trying to unpack what the, specific user stories are that are a part of this that we're going to be solving for what the variables are that might change over time and that knowledge and empowerment makes it much easier to have the kinds of conversations and to have that kind of collaboration and partnership on developing the strategy moving forward that Eduardo speaking to. Sometimes folks don't want to spend the time on that, but doesn't need to take a you know, doesn't have to be a whole contract of just massive research to understand the ecosystem. A lot of that can happen upfront before you get in or be included as part of the initial data gathering for the for that client in the back and forth in exchanges that happened during the acquisition process, it can start to be integrated early and doesn't have to feel like this time tax that is on top of the project but really integrated into the nature of how we do work and missing that. Our clients love this approach and they're really excited to partner with us again and we're excited when we get to partner with other groups on doing this work too, because I think it strengthens us all collectively to see the different approaches of how some others, especially those who are part of Digital Service Coalition and understand these agile processes, are working together towards some of these aims. I love it. So impactful by design. What are some tips you can give to government that might be listening to this to prepare for a solution? Digital services solution. What would be helpful? Bringing all their voices. It is not uncommon to see an organization being represented by just their IT department or one specific department and then be like, how do we get approval for this? That requires Chicco. How do we get clearance for this content? Oh, that requires the Comms office. How do we collect this information? That requires LegAffairs; and it just becomes this whole thing where if you go down the path of like, this is easy chances are that the answer is not. And there's so much wealth of knowledge within people and the federal government, within the specific agencies that have been doing a lot of unfortunately, hidden work to keep systems of processes working and shining a light and providing them the ability to step forward, to step up, to actually represent those processes, and for the information that they have to share to now be treated with the level of, respect that it requires, that makes everything better. And so bringing in all the voices and being thoughtful about the time that it takes to achieve things I think is probably one of the most critical things that I could tell anyone. Just don't minimize the amount of work that it will take or the amount of people that it will take to achieve the kind of outcomes that you're looking for. Excellent. Well, it's a big ship to turn, isn't it For a lot of these challenges to enable government to be able to connect with our citizens. to move that needle? I think, you know, we know what it's like to work in government. Both Eduardo and I worked within government ecosystem before, and just want to think and appreciate just how much complexity many of our clients and stakeholders are really working within in the pressures, it can be so thankless, especially working on complex technologies. Not everybody who, is above them and kind of rank understands why their work is important. Hopefully that changes a little bit more over time and starts to be corrected. But I would encourage our partners and and clients to really trust us with the things that are bothering them and keeping them up at night. We want to be able to help with these. The more knowledge we have on even the kind of personal strains, the easier it's going to be for us to work, to collaborate on solutions. I think also just not just telling us what they know, which is really helpful. And that's built into most procurement processes. But telling us what they don't know yet and want to know those areas that are kind of open, open spaces that need to be explored, even if it's not the primary scope of a of a contract of agreement that we have. We know that those are areas that they're looking to explore. Sometimes we can artfully collect some of this data and insights and share it back and be a partner to them in filling those gaps so that they can more effectively do their jobs. And you get really excited about those. Cherry is on the top for our clients, but it takes things trust and often takes time. As we've already talked a little bit about. That's awesome. So what does success look like for Coforma? Where are you guys heading in the future? I think this is maybe a good time for our announcement piece. Yeah, I think success has a few different lenses to it. The first one is sustainability. We aim to be in the ecosystem and to cause it to be part of long lasting impacts. So we are consistently looking at our structures and how we are able to pivot and address the needs of the organization as well as the work that we are doing to achieve those to that end, starting on January 1st. Ashleigh moved from being our Chief Experience Officer to being our Chief Operations Officer. This is going to be a huge win for the overarching organization to stay alive. So as it enables us to align all of the work that we are doing behind one specific leader and achieve economies of scale and economies of our capabilities as we continue to work with our partners to help them themselves deliver the type of impact that they are looking for. So that is the first lens of success for Coforma and for us. A second one is about continuing to have access to the organizations that we've been working with and that we are intent on working with and helping them make the big transformational achievements that they have been planning for, helping to continue to reduce the burden that daytime sales are attempting to reduce and the provisioning of services to the people that need them so that people are able to live better and dignified lives. that's what success looks like to me. That sounds great. Ashleigh, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. my role that's been kind of prior custom shape. So experience in a lot of places means one distinct thing and for Coforma what that meant over the past kind of nearly five years is really focusing on three lenses of experience across the experience of products and services that Coforma creates. Largely the past years for me and Coforma, that's been leading and building our design team, which includes design from content design, design research, to enable the most thoughtful end experiences for the customers and citizens who use the products and services that we create. But it's also included our client and partner experience that kind of customer experience lens and be thoughtful about the standards. That's been from our brand communications to our project communications to ensure that our partnership approach continued to be thoughtful, even as we scaled over these past years. And I think importantly, the employee experience, which is maybe neglected in many organizations, but we really strongly believe that you can't have a really good customer experience and product experience if you're not also thoughtfully managing and building an employee experience that takes care of the whole needs of employees as people with lives in and outside of work. And we've chosen to do so in a way that's communicative and participatory. And we hope can lead to positive, lasting economic mobility for our employees who stick with us as well. So even while my role is changing, I kind of reflect on that back because all of that is still moving forward with us. And now we've just got more robust team and leadership within our group that understand those kind of markers we've put in place, the standards we've put in place and are helping drive those forward. That enables us to kind of focus some of that effort and our communications and our structure further as we continue to mature. And as you've probably heard already from us, part of our philosophy really kind of thinking and reflecting on that COO role is really how we do the work matters as much as the results. So that is tying through everything that we're doing. And this next, you know, stake in the ground to ensure that as we grow into this next phase, as we build even more long lasting client relationships, this is what I'm speaking to and grow the team to match that how we do the work has consistency and can continue to build the trust and the brand that we've established so far. That's excellent. Well, thank you both so much. Your passion around the work that you do, in delivering high value, and certainly ROI on behalf of the government in terms of the mission is just so phenomenal to me. And it's so refreshing to have the opportunity to see you all in action. I mean, it's just so fun, right? It's not just let's get a technology and just slap it on and they'll be good to go. No, you care. You care about the work that you do. You care that we're leading. And I would say most people do care about the mission, but you all live it every single day. And I want to thank you for that and that leadership. Well, thank you for saying that and for recognizing. I'm so glad that that comes through from us, that that passion comes through. And we're both creative people, too. So for us, I love that you use the word fun, too. We talk about that for our culture internally. This work is hard and it's complicated, but it should also be fun. Like solving problems in creative and unique ways is a privilege, and being able to make such a lasting impact in the spaces that we work in partnership with such intelligent and giving public servants is just, you know, an honor and something that all of our folks should, enjoy. you have your moments now and then, right? But everybody should really enjoy and feel fueled at the end of the day, so we're feel privileged to have built up a team that is so aligned with us on values and interests that that is a shared feeling. That's great. Any last thoughts, Eduardo? I think my last thought is that we've seen in the past 2 to 3 years so many amazing organizations coming into the ecosystem who are incredibly talented and with a ton of capabilities and promise. And I'm so excited to see this push and this renewed appetite for competition that it's going to make all of us better, is going to make those firms that are larger than us have to be more thoughtful about the work that they do because they are seeing newer entrants in the space. It's going to make firms like us have to be more cognizant of the fact that we are one of many, that we are not special, and that we cannot just rest on our laurels. And hopefully what that will serve is as guidance to those new entrants to see that firms that have been in this space for a bit are looking at them and respecting them and improving their capabilities to continue to be good partners. So I'm very, very excited about this. push and competition in this space and to continue to deliver value for the people and the organizations that are trying to deliver value to them. That's wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Ashleigh and Eduardo, for joining me today to have this discussion about the great work that you all are leading. Thank you for the spaces and I really appreciate it. We are incredibly grateful for the time. Absolutely. It's our pleasure. This concludes today's episode of the Fed two Fed podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review. Your feedback helps us continue bringing you thought provoking conversations with the brightest minds in government technology. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to explore opportunities to harness the power of technology and explore what's next in developing a more innovative and efficient government. Until then, this is the fair to Fed podcast by Govtech Connects. Thank you for joining us.