Translating DoD Experience into Private Sector Success
I recently stepped away from my role as the Department of Defense’s first Customer Experience Officer, and like many who have spent years in public service, I am now navigating what comes next. In conversations with hiring managers, recruiters, and executives, I have been asked a familiar set of questions. They often want to know how government experience translates into business outcomes, how I think about profit and loss, and how I approach growth when my recent DoD work has never been measured by quarterly earnings. If you are making a similar transition, these are some of the themes and lessons I have found useful. Hopefully, they will be helpful for you too.
Memoir excerpt: Arrival
America moved fast. It assumed fluency. It demanded adaptation.
My mother became a nanny. Not because it was easy, but because caring for children was the one skill she carried across oceans and borders. She couldn’t read or write English. Not because she wasn’t intelligent but because survival had never afforded her the time.
“All I knew,” she once told me, “was how to take care of kids. So I did that. And I prayed you’d have more.”
She folded laundry, warmed bottles, braided hair that was not her own. She did not complain. But she did watch. She paid attention to everything. She protected us in ways that no curriculum could ever teach.
Her life wasn’t measured in degrees or promotions. It was measured in the strength of her back and the tenderness of her hands.
As a child, my mother, Im, was traditionally beautiful in the way old songs remember women—graceful but grounded, her beauty a quiet kind that refused to beg for attention. She had high cheekbones like the curves of Kampot’s hills, a slender nose, and brows that framed a gaze too intense for someone so young. Her skin held the warmth of ripe tamarind, her hair thick and black as river silt, often knotted into braids by her full sister, only to be torn loose when she ran wild with the boys barefoot across the compound. Even then, there was something decisive in her—a girl forged not for decoration, but for endurance.
Memoir excerpt: Pamela
In 2004, Pioneer Square still held onto its soul. Back then it was the heart of Seattle’s startup scene, raw and unpolished, where the uneven brick streets carried both history and possibility. The air smelled of espresso, wet pavement, and the faint tang of beer drifting out of half-empty taverns. Galleries stood beside pawn shops, dive bars beside coffeehouses where artists and coders argued over ideas. Whole blocks seemed stitched together by oddities, like the endless rug stores that lined the streets. Their windows were stacked with Persian carpets and handwoven runners, yet I never once saw anyone walk out with a rug. We used to joke that they had to be a front for something else, probably money laundering, because no one in Pioneer Square was decorating lofts with five-thousand-dollar carpets. It was a neighborhood where ambition felt rough-edged and real, not yet staged for tourists. Today, much of that grit has been smoothed over. The dive bars have been replaced with cocktail lounges serving craft infusions at twenty dollars a glass. The pawn shops and discount stores have given way to boutiques that sell vintage jackets for the price of a week’s groceries. Restaurants now sit on every corner, with menus written in chalk and entrées priced for visitors, not residents. What once felt like a creative frontier has become a curated showroom. The edges have been polished, the history commodified. But in 2004, the place still belonged to the people who made things, who sketched in notebooks, who argued over startups in secondhand chairs, who believed they could bend the city to their will.
Take the call
Take the call. When you’re in government, especially in a place like the Pentagon, your time is constantly spoken for. The meetings are nonstop, the mission is pressing, and your inbox fills faster than you can clear it. Requests come in from all directions: internal teams, senior leaders, oversight bodies, and yes, vendors trying to introduce solutions or share new capabilities.
It’s easy to wave off those external calls. After all, there are plenty of guardrails, ethics rules, and real concerns about time, relevance, and intent. But I made a conscious choice to take those calls, especially if they aligned with the mission space I owned because sometimes, it’s damn hard to see outside of the five-sided tunnel.