Kathleen Sebelius is a politician, not a product designer.

The fiasco surrounding the roll-out of The Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare) website might be the most predictable innovation failure of the last 30 years.

It pains me to say so, as I’m a believer in the law, but wow, the Obama administration screwed the pooch on this one. There really is no excuse  — although there are logical reasons — why this happened. Sound application development principles are well known in the IT community. Somebody should have known how to use modern techniques to insure success. I’m sure many people building this application did know — sadly, political matters trumped a consumer perspective, good design principles, and creative problem solving.

I feel their pain. As an entrepreneur in the 90’s I was part of a start-up that developed a wireless patient record system for use in large scale physician practices. It was a very complex healthcare application, and much like the ACA website, we tried to do everything at once — with similar results. Our initial version of the product was buggy — we had to re-architect the application, painfully starting over with the simplest functionality and then testing as we went. The Lean Startup by Eric Reis is a current book on how to do this properly — apparently a book not read by anyone on the President’s team.

What are the more general innovation lessons we can learn to avoid our own ACA-like application development (product development) nightmares? Here’s my “BIG FOUR”:

1. Prototype, prototype, prototype. Get a better understanding of what users want and how they respond to your product as-you-go. This is done by crafting just-good-enough modules and putting them in front of real users. You then observe, adjust, and try again. Once you get it right, you pull the code back in and flesh it out. You’re then building an app on solid ground, one function at a time. This principle is not just for application development, but any product that users/customers/consumers interact with. Learn by doing.
2. Consumers drive design. What you think is cool, or a great idea, inside an application or a product is often meaningless to consumers. Their perspective is the only one that counts! Your “cool’ can equal their nightmare. You understand better by watching them use the product, and then you adjust (does this sound familiar? observation is a key idea of design thinking, see IDEO). Apparently, the administration changed the design for political reasons and ignored the user experience. If you want to create an awesome product, the user experience is all that matters, start — and end — there. 
3. Systems need champions to protect their integrity. I’m dead certain there were high level people at the development contractors company that warned the administration about the last minute design changes. What would have saved the administration’s bacon would have been to a.) listen, or b.) to have a high level person who could say no to the politicians. This should have been Kathleen Sebelius — but she’s a politician, not a product designer, and, she allowed political concerns to corrupt the system design. CGI Federal caved. ACA needed a Jonny Ive. Somebody needs to stand tall for a consumer-oriented product — does your product have an integrity champion?
4. If it’s not soup, don’t serve it. Again, as much as I hate to say this, these initial woes, even if corrected, will forever stain the “brand” of the ACA application. You only get once chance to make a first impression. It would have been better to roll out ACA enrollment manually than to release the band-aid and  bailing wire website — they should have served some hummus before the soup. Don’t release a product you aren’t proud of just to make a deadline. 

My final thought — solving complex challenges requires structured creative problem solving. Perhaps the fifth lesson learned here is that when you are panicked you throw out the imaginative thinking necessary to come up with better alternatives. There were other solutions to the political issues related to the ACA website that would have emerged in a CPS framework.

And it’s too late to send the administration 100 copies of Jack’s Notebook!