Unpacking the systemic friction and design flaws that stall transformation—and how mission-first leaders are breaking through.
At the heart of government transformation is a fundamental and often overlooked challenge: seeing the system clearly to fix it. The “Mapping the Mission & Technical Domain” session block at Prodacity 2025 tackled this topic.
Featuring powerful insights from Karen Martin, Joe Szodfridt, and a Space Force fireside chat with Paul Contoveros, Lt Col Jeremy “JJ” Homan, and Carlo Viray, this block revealed how unintentional friction, fragmented tooling, and siloed teams derail even the best-intentioned transformation efforts.
But it also surfaced solutions.
Here are four mission-critical takeaways:
1. Unintentional Friction Is the Hidden Killer of Mission Flow
“Chaos is the outcome of friction and friction is almost never intentional.” – Karen Martin
Karen Martin opened with a stark truth: most organizational dysfunction isn’t the result of bad people or poor leadership, but friction in the system that creates chaos, erodes flow, and keeps good teams from delivering value.
Her antidote? Value stream mapping. Not as a buzzword, but as a leadership tool.
She walked the audience through real-world examples where local optimization (like faster lab tests or code deployments) did nothing to accelerate outcomes because the broader system had delays or disconnects that stalled momentum. Improving a team is meaningless if the overall system is still stuck. The goal is to achieve better flow across the whole process.
Key takeaways for federal leaders:
- Don’t just optimize components or departments; leaders must elevate their view to optimize end-to-end delivery for system-wide gains.
- Value stream mapping is a leadership activity, not a delegated task. Use it to see the unseen and enable flow as much as speed or output.
- Use metrics like Percent Complete & Accurate (PCA) to determine handoff quality between teams to mitigate rework, clarification, or correction by the next person in the value stream.
2. Modernization Without Clarity Is Just More Noise
“They’ve done all this work and still feel they can’t get anywhere. They’re drowning in their own documentation.” – Joe Szodfridt
Joe Szodfridt painted a familiar picture: a federal-scale team with hundreds of engineers, mountains of domain-driven design artifacts, and still no clear path forward. The problem wasn’t effort. It was clarity.
Joe’s response? A thin-slice modeling approach that simplifies complexity and brings everyone—technical and non-technical—into the design process.
The core steps:
- Start with a thin slice: a real mission scenario with a defined beginning and end.
- Map it with event storming: group related tasks into visual “clumps” to reveal system capabilities.
- Model communication flows: highlight where asynchronous handoffs create or relieve friction.
- Capture just enough detail: APIs, data ownership, user stories, on simple cards that keep the conversation focused.
- Iterate through more slices until the architecture stabilizes and the lines stop changing.
This approach is fast, inclusive, and deliberately lightweight. After two days of modeling with a major client, Joe’s team produced a complete system view for a planning session with 300 stakeholders aligned around a shared model.
3. Codifying Pain Points Is the First Step Toward Closing Capability Gaps
“You wouldn’t believe this, but one of our biggest problems was codifying pain points.” – Paul Contoveros
The Space Force fireside with Paul Contoveros and Lt Col JJ Homan delivered a real operational perspective. Their mission: close the gap between capability and threat. Their reality: operators couldn’t articulate what they needed.
That changed when they got serious about:
- Listening with intent
- Mapping pain points
- Prioritizing work based on threat curves and readiness, not stakeholder volume
One of their standout wins? A scheduling tool at a Maui space surveillance site. Instead of building another telescope, the team optimized existing workflows, increasing collection capacity by 20% and delivering ~$5M/year in avoided costs.
Tactics federal teams can adopt:
- Treat value stream mapping as a mission prioritization tool, not a paperwork exercise.
- Don’t chase tools. Chase outcomes that close threat gaps.
- Build software that proves the requirement, not the other way around.
- Reframe “innovation” as solving real operator problems, not just building new tech.
4. Systems Thinking Is Just Step One. You Need Systems Action.
“We’ve gotten great at admiring the system. But systems understanding without action is useless.” – JJ Homan
Homan made a compelling distinction between systems engineering and what he calls mission engineering. Where systems engineering often ends with understanding, mission engineering is about optimizing for outcomes and driving delivery. While the journey began with loosely scoped innovation projects, it transitioned to measurable enhancements across Space Force operations.
Contoveros grounded the conversation in realism: none of this came easily. The team started without in-house software expertise and no playbook for tools like value stream mapping. But by aligning stakeholders, securing funding, and building credibility, they transformed early chaos into a replicable, focused delivery model.
Their new approach pairs operators with software delivery teams, turning operations units into capability owners, not just users.
What this means for GovTech transformation:
- Don’t start with “build an app.” Start with understanding the pain in the system.
- Build the budget around outcomes, not just plans.
- Formalize a mechanism to capture, prioritize, and close the gap between capability and threat.
TL;DR: What This Means for Federal Agencies
Friction isn’t a people problem,it’s a system problem. Fix the flow.
Documentation without clarity is noise. Find your thin slice and go high-level first.
Close the gap between capability and threat by codifying pain in the system.
Move from understanding to execution. Systems thinking without action will never be enough.
Value stream mapping isn’t a tool. It’s a leadership move.
About the Prodacity 2025 Blog Series
This blog is part of the Prodacity 2025 Blog Series, which distills insights from the symposium's most impactful sessions. This edition covers the “Mapping the Mission & Technical Domain” session block featuring Karen Martin, Joe Szodfridt, Paul Contoveros, JJ Homan, and Carlo Viray.