One CEO’s push to speed up how the Pentagon adopts technology

Early in her career, Meagan Metzger walked into a program office with a simple question: Why was the government building software it could just buy?

Again and again, she saw the same pattern: the government spending time and money building technology that already existed in the commercial market — often ending up with something slower, more expensive and less effective.

She saw it as a systems integrator building software for the Army, scaling a company and working with commercial tech firms that wouldn’t touch the federal market. And she saw it inside government, where the challenge wasn’t the technology.

“The tech’s easy,” she said. “It’s all the unsexy stuff that gets in the way.”

So she started figuring out how to work around it. Where others saw barriers — requirements, contracting, incentives — Metzger saw problems to solve. If there was a path forward, she was going to find it.

In 2015, she founded Dcode, a tech accelerator, to help startups break into the federal market. But over time, she realized the bigger problem wasn’t companies, it was the system. Today, Dcode works with government leaders to help them become better customers of technology.

A decade later, that work had taken on new urgency. Metzger worked directly with leaders across the U.S. Army and the Defense Department to turn acquisition reform into execution, helping them act on new authorities as they took shape.

As reform accelerated, Metzger pushed leaders to think differently: not program by program, but as a portfolio. What matters most? Where do you take risk? What do you stop doing?

Instead of waiting for perfect guidance, she helped teams build ways to act through decision structures, operating rhythms and mechanisms that let them move as soon as the door opened.

The results were fast. Dcode helped drive an OTA-based procurement from zero to live in under 30 days, launched a secure tech marketplace proof of concept in 24 hours and connected dozens of venture firms and hundreds of companies to urgent mission needs.

More importantly, Metzger helped close the gap between identifying commercial technology and getting it into operators' hands by cutting through the friction that typically slows it down.

At times, that work has put her in rooms where few outsiders are invited. In one meeting with more than 20 one-, two- and three-star generals, Metzger was the only civilian — and one of the only women — at the table.

At one point, a senior leader paused the discussion and asked what they were doing wrong.

“I was just like, ‘China does not care about the decisions you're making right now. They're going to kick your ass,’” she said. “They trusted me to be in that room and call them on the carpet, but then want to do something about it.”

For Metzger, that’s the job: find the friction and remove it.