Engineering in a Political Crisis

GrowSF Clubhouse series

Engineering in a Political Crisis

When: Wednesday, February 24, 5PM PT

Guests:

• Kyle Rush, former Deputy CTO of Hillary for America
• Kalvin Wang, former Engineer on Healthcare.gov

Hosts

• Bilal Mahmood
• Steven Buss

Notes

Engineering on the Hillary Campaign

Overview of running the technical org in a political campaign

• Primary responsibility is to enable other teams with technology
• There are 9+ teams - content operations, email, field, finance, fundraising, etc
• Examples of how technology assists with teams
  • Content - maintained the website and ability to push content
  • Field - build apps for volunteers to coordinate door knocking, automate and digitize manual data entry, convert data entry into models
  • Finance - built a system called bundler to track high dollar donors
  • Election Day - built software for volunteers and poll watchers
  • Email - maintained CRM

Tech Stack

• Data warehouse in HP Vertica - contains all voter files / registered voters in the country
• EC2
• Wordpress
• AWS, Python
• Several internally built tools

Crises Faced

• Every day is actually a crisis in a campaign
• Primary milestones in a campaign are driven by fundraising deadlines
• Every quarter is a fundraising deadline to report to FTC; most of donations come on last day of the quarter
• One big crisis they had was the email server going down the last day of the quarter
• Had to rebuild the email tool from scratch in under 3 hours, but it succeeded

Challenges faced by a Political Campaign

• A lot of software is built internally, and then thrown out at end of every campaign
  • Very little is re-used in next campaign
  • Campaigns are 1.5 years long
• Comms plays the role of compliance in other context - always derisking messaging - control the images used, etc - important because one image can destroy a campaign
  • Fun fact: their team A/B tested a lot of photos for emails/website; photos with a spouse or doing normal things (like playing basketball) perform a lot better
• Hiring is one of the biggest challenges
  • Had to hire a 80 person team, but takes a long time to hire
  • Engineers dont get equivalent salary or benefits to Silicon Valley, so difficult ask
  • Other non-technical teams have career campaign employees because they hope to get into the administration, but technical talent goes back to private sector; this results in other departments fully staffed from day 1, but tech is 0 staff at day 1
  • Solution was to hire people who really believe in a mission, but still very slow to change next time

Things

• Buy more OOTB software, not build from scratch
• Have 80 engineers from day 1, not incremental throughout the campaign

Engineering on Healthcare.gov

How is the team structured

• There were only 4 engineers and 1 eng leader fulltime
• The rest of staff are 1000s of contractors

Challenge

• No product / political project manager to guide technical development
• Too many organizational layers
  • Too many acronyms, too many orgs
  • No context on the line of command, who is responsible for what
  • No clear decision maker for things
• Compliance
  • Lots of regulatory protocols requiring approval
  • Note: there are no compliance protocols in a political campaign
  • To get approval to transition to AWS took 6 months