The Oddball Way
It’s the journey we take with every client, from the discovery and solutioning work before day one, to the day the work outlives us. One team owns the solution, end to end, right there with you. Every step ends in something you and the people we serve can see working the way it always should have.
Target the Problem
The work starts on what moves the mission, making life easier for everyone along the way.
01. Target the Problem
The homework starts before kickoff
We get deep in the policy, the systems, and the users before we’re on the clock, arriving as subject matter experts in our own right. Day one opens with the right questions instead of orientation. The problem shapes what we build, no bigger and no trendier than the mission needs.
What it looks like. When feedback data showed Veterans hesitant to leave legacy sign-ins, the identity team knew the domain well enough to ask why, and answered with in-person help at VA medical centers, direct outreach, and in-product guidance. More than 3 million My HealtheVet accounts made the move.
02. Deploy the Team That Stays
Hired for the person, built for the mission
Right person, right seat means qualified isn’t enough. We select for your mission, your agency, and the team they’ll join, so everyone arrives bought in. Employee or partner, everyone works badgeless on one backlog, pulling in the same direction. The team arrives with proven products, platforms, playbooks, and tooling sized to your program, and we build custom only when it’s worth it, with the experience to know where that line is.
What it looks like. Less than 2% of applicants get an offer, a lower rate than Harvard admissions. Seats fill in 21 days on average, and retention runs 96% across Oddball. Turnover doesn’t cost you a step.
03. Build Like We Own It
The best available, top to bottom
Startup craftsmanship without the startup risk. Owning it means building the way we’d build for ourselves, with the best tools and practices around. We’re citizens too, with friends and family who rely on the same services we build. What counts as best keeps changing; our insistence on it doesn’t.
What it looks like. On CMS BDAMAX, serving 60+ million Medicare beneficiaries, we rebuilt the data pipelines to run in parallel and cut nightly processing from 10 hours to 2.5, with compliance-as-code and automated security checks keeping security part of the build from day one.
04. Measure the Outcome
What we learn steers the next build
We define success with you, in the open. Then we measure the outcome that actually matters to your mission, not just the prettier screen on top of it. Those results tell us where to focus, and the credit to you follows from getting that right.
What it looks like. On CMS CWF, Medicare’s claims backbone, bills kept coming in for more COVID test kits than the rules allowed. The team built a check and kept tightening it until the overbilling stopped, catching 5.8 million claims across more than 30 million beneficiary records and referring them so the benefits real people count on stayed protected.
05. Leave It Stronger
Built to hand off from day one
Documentation and transition planning start when we do, so your institutional knowledge never lives only in someone’s head. Our people tend to stay, but your program never has to bet on it. Run by us for years or handed to the next team, the work leaves our hands healthier than it arrived. What we build under your contract leaves with you.
What it looks like. On the VA.gov Forms team, we sharpened the “How to digitize a form” guide and the form generator, cutting bugs and manual setup for any team standing up a new one. The accessibility patterns we documented live in the VA Design System, helping teams we’ll never meet. Building for the teams who come next is the day job.
Each one is true and provable on its own, and no one else can put all three together.
Commercial speed, government fluency
The pace of a commercial product company, aimed at the hardest problems in government.
Why we can claim it
Oddball runs on the engineering culture of a commercial product shop and proves it in the U.S. federal government, where the stakes are as high as they get. Digital services peers lack the contracting maturity and pragmatism to meet you where you are; traditional integrators lack the product discipline. We sit in the seam on purpose, and the rigor travels wherever the mission goes next.
Proof. A decade of prime delivery across VA, CMS, SEC, USAF, and DHA. In Oddball’s first year on HealthCare.gov work, the team cleared three ATOs, one issued with zero open POAMs. Oddball delivers working prototypes during the pursuit, built for a solicitation, not repurposed from somewhere else. Commercial pace inside the government’s own security bar.
Trusted with what matters most
Agencies hand us the platforms where failure is a headline.
Why we can claim it
Most digital services firms build applications, and most integrators manage programs. Oddball operates the platform layer other teams build on for the government’s most visible systems, and takes on the hardest engineering, data, and AI problems. Behind every one of those systems is a person: a Veteran getting the reminder for tomorrow’s appointment, a family enrolling in health insurance.
Proof. 600+ developers on 60+ product teams ship 166 products through an Oddball-built platform. CMS handed over HealthCare.gov’s consumer surface 90 days before Open Enrollment, and Oddball carried 16.3 million enrollments without a consumer-visible outage. The sign-in services run by Oddball engineers moved more than 3 million My HealtheVet accounts to modern credentials and serve 100% of VA.gov users. 99.9% uptime on VA.gov means a Veteran can reach what they’ve earned the moment they need to. These are the systems agencies can’t afford to get wrong, which is why they hand them to Oddball.
Strangely human, deeply invested
People hired for the person first, who learn your business and then challenge it.
Why we can claim it
The right skills are just the starting point. We hire for character and a restless drive to make things better. The people who clear that bar dig into your mission because they care about the people on the other end, and they lift the teammates around them as a reflex. That’s a partner who’s in it with you, not a seat-filler working tickets.
Proof. On the SEC’s disclosure review program, the team went deep enough into Corporation Finance’s workflow to take DREAM, the division’s review-automation platform, into production and keep it running. Nobody goes that deep to fill a seat.
You don’t have to choose.
A beltway integrator can claim the scale but never the culture or the speed. A boutique can claim the culture but never the platform-layer trust or the federal depth. A product shop can claim the tool, but not the fit. Only Oddball can claim all three at once.