Two years ago I joined the USDS and started working with the VA. One of my projects was to help fix the system Veterans use to schedule online appointments. The

Two years ago I joined the USDS and started working with the VA. One of my projects was to help fix the system Veterans use to schedule online appointments. The problems were many and ranged from poor technical solutions up to senior managers not wanting to green light a small release without a few months of meetings. Over two months of some of the most intense work I have ever done ( most of it non technical ) we released seven times and drove traffic on the system from 100 interactions a month to 15,000 a month. The system is still pretty bad, but people can use it, which means Veterans can schedule a mental health appointment on their phone. That may have just been the thing to save their life. Now every time I am having a hard day I pull up the Google Analytics of that system and look how many people have scheduled an appointment today. I might not have fixed everything, but just knowing we made something better has been the most rewarding thing I have ever done