Rohan Bhobe was working as a product manager at a San Francisco technology company when he got an offer that would change the course of his career: quit your job and come fix HealthCare.gov with us.
Bhobe saw the impact he could have on the American people and couldn't turn it down. Next thing he knew he was working with a crew of other technologists in a McMansion in Maryland to fix the site after its infamous failures when it launched. The group of technologists who came in to fix HealthCare.gov eventually gave rise to the U.S. Digital Service and other related organizations.
His work with HealthCare.gov led to his current endeavor as co-founder and CEO of Nava, which works with government agencies to improve their web applications. Currently, they're working with the Department of Veterans Affairs to make their appeals system more responsive.
So, of course, with a career built with federal government technology, Bhobe hopes the next administration will see the value in making a federal agency's services more responsive to its citizens. And he hopes President-Elect Donald Trump is reading this article right now.
What attracted you to working with government agencies and doing that kind of work?
The HealthCare.gov experience was a very organic thing, and it seemed directly impactful. And it was a good match for my skillset, so it was very easy for me to decide that this is something that I should get involved in. My passion for the space kind of developed over time as a result of working in this environment.
It was a little bit different from somebody who knew they wanted to be invested in improving the way that the government services people, but for me, I think once I got a taste of it, and I felt like I could make a meaningful contribution to this space at this time with this team, those things came together, and I discovered that passion along the way.
So why continuing working the federal government after shipping the initial systems with HealthCare.gov?
I couldn't see a way that I could make a bigger difference. Working with my team, I discovered the passion for this work in the process of contributing to our first couple projects.
Once we made progress and shipped stuff and it was out in the wild and operating, it became addictive to me to want to see that impact and that sort of benefit that we've created for users, to scale that and bring that to more places.
It just became the natural place where if I cared about that impact, this was the place to do it.
How have you seen Nava grow and develop since starting it?
So at first we were a team of less than 10 people that had just come off shipping work at HealthCare.gov. We had shipped those systems successfully and we went through a process of introspecting—"What do the next steps look like for us?" For the folks that founded Nava, there was a shared set of values and everybody on the team. In some degree was self-selecting that everyone on the team had that same set of values.
Since then we've managed to grow as a company—we've gone from less than 10 to about 30—and we've also been very deliberate about getting involved in work that is similarly meaningful.
Our objective is to radically improve the way that government improves people. That involves working on problem areas where government programs have the opportunity to increase the quality of people's lives. We've since gotten involved with a project with the Department of Veteran's Affairs. Right now, it takes on average five years for the VA to resolve a single appeal, which is just not really a situation that people want to see. We think that our technology and design skills can help re-imagine that appeals processing system so that the VA is able to get timely and accurate decisions back to veterans.
You can't make the same assumptions that go into Silicon Valley technology products.
Nava is a tech startup working mostly with the federal government. How does that juxtaposition play out?
We're a team of about 30. We're interacting with an organization that is collectively 10,000 times bigger than we are and has unique obligations in terms of what it needs to do.
The government has a huge range of things that it's responsible for, unique obligations to safeguard people's information, to provide transparency for what the agencies are doing to Congress, to make sure that these programs are well run. There are all these factors. Most of the individuals who work at Nava come from backgrounds in consumer quality product design, so working as engineers, designers or product people. There are certain things about that where you have the luxury of assuming that your users are technology savvy, you are able to clearly segment the way that you understand your customers because you are addressing a particular set of needs.
Whereas, we've really had to open up our thinking a lot more because the federal government is serving everybody. You can't make the same assumptions that go into Silicon Valley technology products. You can't assume, for example, that everybody has an email address.
How has working with the federal government shaped your work as a developer?
I don't think it's necessarily changed me as a developer or a technologist, but in certain ways, it's affected me as a person. Now I have visibility into just how much complexity there can be in services that have to cover broad populations and that need to capture outcomes and situations that are a reflection of the complexity of life.
The main thing for my background is that I haven't worked on something this complex before in the past. I've always been able to make certain assumptions about my users—even if you have millions of users, they're coming to your product for some reason because they have a common need or a common set of needs. It's never as full-spectrum as, you know, life.
Our job is finding ways to make that complexity manageable and finding simplicity in spite of that complexity.
What are your general thoughts on how the Trump administration might change your work and the tech sector found in the federal government?
We're all in wait-and-see mode on what exactly the thinking or the actions will be. But my general thoughts would be that if Donald Trump happens to be reading this article or if I got some time alone with him, what I would want to underscore is government needs to be much more responsive and adaptive to people and to their needs.
There's been large shifts over the last 15 years about what people expect from their government and what they expect as an acceptable level of responsiveness and speed and accuracy. Technology and design have a significant role to play in increasing the responsiveness and adaptability and flexibility of government. We absolutely should not abandon this opportunity and this early momentum that we have of realizing the full potential of technology and design to improve the way that government can serve people.
That's a case that I would make to any lawmaker or government official that would listen.
Government needs to be much more responsive and adaptive to people and to their needs.
What makes the overall D.C. startup community unique?
In my experience, it's that the technology bubble doesn't exist to the same degree, and that's a strength. In some ways, because D.C. is a confluence of not just a budding tech scene but also policy and law and think tanks, there's a lot of different perspectives and stakeholders that call D.C. home. The tech sector is able to hear discussions that are outside the bounds of technology just for technology's sake.
You always want to be close to your users, you always want to be close to the source of information that you're using that's being folded into your thinking process. You sort of hear these different perspectives and stakeholder views. That's a powerful thing because if you're not exposed to that how can you design for something you don't have exposure to?
What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?
When you commit to doing something, introspect deeply and understand why you're getting involved with that. Inevitably there will be hard times associated with starting a business or starting an endeavor, and I think in those moments you want to be able to fall back on the deeper motivation than just "I wanna be successful at something."
There needs to be an intrinsic form of motivation that affects you deeply to carry you through those difficult times.
