U.S. Space Force - Platform Delivery Modernization

The impact

MVP cycle time: 6 months to 2 weeks, a 92% reduction. First app cleared Operational Acceptance and reached production. Trust restored across engineering, security, and leadership.

A stalled 20+ project portfolio began delivering on a reliable 2-week cadence. Seven roadmap iterations shipped across contract deliverable periods, each aligned to mission outcomes rather than internal politics. The headline is the 92%, but the number that explains it is one: the count of apps that had ever passed Operational Acceptance before this work was zero.

The teams were not the problem

When I arrived, the Capabilities Development Division was stuck. MVPs took more than six months to reach production. Contractors juggled 15+ priorities without a roadmap. Leadership was drowning in one-off asks. Tooling was scattered across Teams, Mattermost, Linear, GitLab, ServiceNow, Confluence, SharePoint, and notebooks. People were working hard, which is exactly why "tell them to work harder" was the wrong move. The output problem was a system problem wearing a delivery costume.

So I diagnosed before prescribing. I audited every story across every team, consolidated scope, and rewrote the backlog from scratch with structured templates and clear acceptance criteria. That meant sitting with engineers, program leads, and civil-service stakeholders to learn what each piece of work was really for, then sequencing it against mission outcomes instead of politics. The audit surfaced the thing everyone felt but no one had named.

Fix the constraint once, not the symptom everywhere

The constraint was Operational Acceptance. OA existed to ensure production safety, a legitimate goal in a security-sensitive defense environment, but in practice it had become a gate that blocked continuous delivery entirely. No app had ever passed it. Every team optimizing its own velocity was polishing a car with no road out of the garage.

The leverage was obvious once the system was visible: do not speed up twenty teams, open the gate once. I coached the Nimbus Weather eBoard team through Discovery & Framing, Inception, and MVP, then worked with CDD leadership and Range Management to clear Nimbus for production with a safe path through OA rather than around it. That single precedent unblocked continuous delivery for every app team that followed. Coaching one team all the way to production is what made the path real instead of a memo.

Around that, I built the operating system to keep it: a 3-phase org transformation strategy (Forming/Storming, Norming, Performing) with deliverables and people-growth targets per phase; async check-ins, roadmap threads, and decision logs that cut meeting bloat while raising visibility; and outcome-based roadmaps framed as Problem/Opportunity, Test, Outcome, Impact, iterated across 7 CLIN deliverable periods so stakeholders had evidence of progress and a shared language for what came next.

The work ran past delivery mechanics. I facilitated strategic alignment with the SLD Tech Director, coordinated across Rise8, Metronome, BeastCode, and other SBIR partners, and designed the K8 Playbook, Rise8's internal product training curriculum spanning Levels 0-7. I started at 6am ET daily from the Pacific timezone to pair with my team and stay aligned with CDD's eastern schedule.

What this built

• A delivery engine that runs on outcomes, not checklists. Teams ship on a 2-week cadence with clean backlogs, scoped sprints, and priorities grounded in mission need and engineering feasibility.
• A cleared path to production. The OA reform set a precedent for continuous delivery in a security-sensitive environment, unblocking every app team after Nimbus.
• A repeatable transformation playbook. The phased maturity model, coaching frameworks, and rituals are codified for future portfolio leads to inherit.