Data Storytelling for the Government

My most recent job was working for the Department of Veterans Affairs, in the Veteran Experience Services. There, I managed a team that built data products. Our main product was an interactive organizational map that connected known veteran pain points to the departments and IT systems supporting them. It evolved from a request to make a standardized service design map — but we quickly realized that given the complexity of the VA, there was just too much information for anyone to take on at once, let alone when trying to read a PDF on a government-issued laptop.

This drove us to explore interactivity as a tool for letting people learn on their own terms. We got resoundingly positive feedback from program managers, and saved other teams hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars’ worth of orientation time. We had hoped to open source the work, but our third year of promised funding got revoked in 2025.

The other project we worked on was a data story, in response to a congressional inquiry about veteran travel benefits. This was a case where, in order to explain the context of what was happening, there was a lot of complicated technical information to communicate to non-technical people. Inspired my previous work with data journalists, I suggested we give the project lead an online data storytelling tool, to make sure people understood that progress was being made. We did, and got more positive feedback.

I am incredibly proud of the work I did at the VA, but unfortunately, I am not able to openly share it. My team did present their work on data storytelling at Code for America’s FormFest 2025, and again at the Code for America Summit 2026.