Note: This is the last you’ll hear about our experience in GSA. We convened this retro to give the team closure and to share our experience with the world. We’re happy we get to do that, and from here we move on from GSA. Thanks for granting us this space. 

An Obituary for a Great Team

How the dissolution of the Service Design-Enterprise Digital Experience team blasted a hole in effective & efficient technology work—but also validated the team’s approach. 

The Service Design - Enterprise Digital Experience (SD-EDX) team held a particularly important place in the digital modernization of the US federal government. It was disbanded in the DOGE-led purge of March 2025, aged around four years.

Government teams are built to take on complex, untidy, systematic problems: wicked problems, in the design industry parlance. One such problem for the US federal government remains the incredible proliferation of government websites. These digital products currently number in the thousands; they have been built over decades, are maintained by dozens of agencies, and purport to serve millions of Americans daily. But do they? Sometimes, in some ways. But digital infrastructure, like all infrastructure, requires constant strategic maintenance. But until the 2019 passage of the 21st Century IDEA* legislation was that there was no direct mandate to perform that maintenance. 

The passage of that bill led the General Services Administration to establish the Enterprise Digital Experience (EDX) team, housed in the agency’s Office of Customer Experience. This team took an interdisciplinary approach led by service design, digital policy, human capital, and engineering expertise, and it was the depth and complexity of the collaborating expertise that set this team apart from previous efforts to manage a vast and evolving digital ecosystem. And it was that collaboration that powered the team to achieve the goals of the 21st Century IDEA in just four years. 

The team at GSA faced not just the technical complexity of evaluating websites, but the human complexity of helping colleagues understand why it mattered and what to do about it. Work started in a manner very unlike other government modernization efforts: there was very little fanfare at the team’s initial creation; there was no multi-million dollar contract award; there were no promises of near-term product launches. 

The team did not pursue a blazing overhaul of the entire agency’s digital properties. Instead, its methods—digital evaluations productized and shipped reliably, collaborative digital governance, and a weeding-out and reformation of an unwieldy basket of 50 different data points per website into a transparent, balanced, and understandable composite indicator —turned a thoughtful, relentless focus on what existed. For the first time, individual website managers and senior leaders understood their wider contexts and what their digital experience truly looked like through their customers' eyes. 

This approach paid off; it was recognized by the Government Accountability Office as among the most effective in the federal government at this monumental task, and within GSA, the team came to represent something beyond metrics: a belief that massive problems yield to empathy, rigor, and collaboration.

The team had not officially been designated sacred or irreplaceable. It was part of the machinery of good governance; design practitioners liked to reference it as proof that modern methods could take root in traditional soil, and it bore, in the words of those who worked with it, "a patient approach" to the complexity and resistance of entrenched systems. It was not proclaimed with fanfare or surrounded by mystique. Nonetheless, its dissolution in March 2025 felt like a rupture. The circumstances were not subtle. As part of the Department of Government Efficiency's broad purge of civil service positions, the team was eliminated along with thousands of other federal workers, in a process that prioritized speed over effectiveness.

All the momentum that the SD-EDX team built.  When organizations invest in expertise, connect specialists across disciplines, and develop shared language and methods, but then allow that work to be ruined, the loss compounds. The team had shown that governments needn't rely solely on external consultants or crisis interventions—that it could build, sustain, and evolve its own capacity to tackle complex problems. Without such models, agencies retreat to familiar patterns: the cycle of temporary solutions, duplicated efforts, and institutional inertia.

What remains are the methods the team built and documented, the frameworks they developed, the website managers they trained, and the proof—in evaluations and governance documents and data composites—that massive problems yield to sustained, empathetic, interdisciplinary effort. Whether anyone will continue what was started, or whether the work will simply dissolve back into the scattered, siloed attempts that preceded it, remains to be seen. After-comers cannot always guess what has been lost.

What we’re into this week

Skipping article-reading this week to take several walks outside.  

Great CX teams use the only proven CX method

Do you want a team so solid that its culture can survive a purge? We’ll teach you how to do it in our Team Training. Two features set our class apart from every other CX training out there: 

1. We have evidence.
   
   Ishmael Interactive teaches the human-centered design (HCD) System, the only method for end-to-end customer experience improvement that stands on the foundation of evidence. No aspirational theory here: just practical, real-world results.
   

2. We wrote it all down.
   
   We’re so confident that HCD works that we wrote it all down in a Guide series that underwent years of applied testing in organizations both large and small.
   
   These step-by-step, fully user-tested HCD Guides spell out the methods that produce effective, efficient, and emotionally resonate solutions for internal and external customers, and you get to keep them forever. No ongoing subscription fees; no land-and-expand consultant projects.   

Ishmael Interactive's team training teaches you the same design-led, human-centered approaches that made the GSA Service Design team so effective at driving change at scale. In the training, you’ll learn: 

1. How to talk to customers so you get the information you need to make meaningful change at the lowest cost. 

2. How to evaluate your resources so that you know what’s viable for your organization to produce and sustain. 

3. How to prepare for,  launch, and continuously deliver a lasting product, service, program, or system into the world. No helicoptering in; no immense tech debt. 

4. How to measure the value and impact of your work and know that you are being truly effective at solving customer problems. 

At $795 per attendee for two days of training, you'll pay a fraction of what business consultancies charge for theory-heavy workshops, and you'll leave with practical methods proven in a real-world government setting where the stakes—and the bureaucracy—were both very real.

Credits

Guests: Behati Hart, Aaron Meyers, Ana Monroe
Facilitator: Alan Brouilette
Producer: Ana Monroe
Text: A Adams
Artwork: The Dance Lesson c. 1879 Edgar Degas. Via the National Gallery.

Why this artwork: Famous for his painters of dancers, this Degas shows how individually trained practitioners come together; solo practitioners who bring their expertise to a show, then disband, taking their expertise with them. But that expertise: it travels, and that ability to work together: it compounds with practice. This is what to expect as former civil servants join the private sector, as the members of the SD-EDX team have: a unique culture of deep expertise combined with collaborative abilities so practiced, they seem effortless.