Farewell to TTS
_{28 April 2025}

Dear TTS friends,

Today is the final day of the 18F RIF notice period, which I gather means I will be separated at the end of the day. (Heaven forbid anything be communicated clearly, amirite?) Anyway, with that assumption in mind, I wanted to take a moment to say farewell.

This isn't how I planned to go. In fact, I didn't plan to go at all.

Back in 2019, when my first term was drawing to a close, I started putting together a doc of what I'd say in my farewell email, if that came to pass, but it didn't. I still have that doc, but a lot of what was in it isn't very relevant anymore. But there are still some goodies!

My time at 18F, and by extension OCSIT and then TTS, has been the most rewarding experience of my career – and ranks very highly in my life in general – across so many dimensions. We have done incredible public service together and along the way, we made friends with each other. We celebrated each other's professional wins and personal wins; we supported each other through difficult professional moments and personal ones. A lot of places claim that their workplace is a family, but TTS really was that. Even the infighting was familial, eventually. (Sorry, Solutions. We could have been better siblings in the early days.) And just like family, nothing brought us closer together than adversity thrust upon us.

What has made TTS special is not that we are uniquely skilled or that we are the gold standard of technologists, but that we care very deeply about public service and we practice it with kindness and compassion. We know which things are important and which things we should be flexible with, and we're willing to flex. In 2018 or so, after a few months of building the eAPD web app with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), we did our first user feedback session. It was brutal. They hated it. But we knew that our attachment to what we built wasn't important. Yeah, it stung, but we'd learned some valuable information, and we knew that it was important to hold on loosely to our assumptions of what users needed. I remember a day in the doldrums, and then Laura Poncé rallied the team the next day by synthesizing the feedback to distill exactly what it was users had disliked, and she pitched us on some alternatives. We got to work, and within a couple of months, we had another feedback session where our users were... not angry at us. A year later, one of the original research participants sat on a panel at a conference alongside one of our product owners evangelizing eAPD to everyone in attendance.

We also knew how to bring joy. Look at our eAPD product owners up there! TTS understands that delivery is the strategy, and when our partners see that delivery can happen at high quality and in short order, they love it. They see us being serious at the times that call for it, and relaxed and goofy when that's more appropriate. They lean into our culture because our culture works.

It has been a pleasure and an honor to serve alongside all but one of you. I thank almost all of you for your dedication to improving the lives of the American people. Regardless of what comes next, your service cannot be undone. The lives you've touched were better in those moments. Nothing can change that. I wish most of you the very best, however your paths unfold from here. Be kind, value others' experiences, show compassion, and be silly.

Be like this giraffe.

I hope we can stay in touch. If you don't know how to reach me outside of GSA, ping me at shy.king4809@fastmail.com and I'll pass along my real info!

Take care, my friends. The American people are better off because we have been here. Never forget that.

--
Greg Walker (he/him)