What happened is that the department brought in a team from the College Board with a long history of working in the product model, and they have transformed the FAFSA and the team responsible for it. Starting last summer, this small band of product leaders, with help from a few detailees from the US Digital Service, took the reins and not only wrestled the form back into functionality but also steered the entire enterprise in a new direction. (Steering makes it sound a lot easier than it was, but you get my drift.)

The new team started hiring actual engineers and product managers. They started procuring capacity from vendors instead of specific deliverables, enabling quicker responsiveness to bugs and user needs. 55% of contractors’ entire FAFSA team used to be dedicated to manual testing, so they automated testing, which enabled them to move from 67 testers to 32, while at the same time dramatically reducing “regressions” where new features break existing functionality. They started doing smaller software releases far more frequently, reducing the risk of introducing bugs into existing functionality, and making it easier to measure outcomes and fix issues quickly.

These changes, especially getting far more digital expertise in the FAFSA staff who could make actual decisions about priorities, allowed them to quit the death march through the predetermined feature set and respond to what users actually needed. The original contract required custom-built analytics software, but the engineers and product managers now on the team knew that commercial off-the-shelf offerings would be better and cheaper, so they just bought what they needed, freeing up budget and development capacity for actual user-facing improvements.