EP 75: The Customer-First Approach Behind NASA SEWP’s Success featuring Joanne Woytek

There's a lot of really interesting things in that description, which is that you had the foresight.

People think of customer service and customer experience like you have to be the person answering the phone or building a website.

And you knew that many years ago that Providing a service and making it so the scientists of NASA could accomplish their mission was also led to them, you know, was important enough.

And that was customer service to you.

So that's amazing.

And then to start a, you know, a pilot project that ended up to be a government wide project.

contract that then agencies became your customers and to be able to, um, to grow NASA soup to the level that it's grown over the years is, is sort of remarkable.

You described it a little bit.

Um, can you, can you share like the, um, the, uh, kind of a little bit of history, if there's any more that you want to share and then accomplishments, I mean, what are you up to NASA six, seven years?

Six.

We're just starting six.

So interfacing to the customer, and I'm glad that we consider the industry to be our customer also.

And ultimately, we do always know that we are there for the taxpayer.

If we are doing this just for our own fun, but not making sure that it's effective, making sure that what we do ultimately serves the missions of our customers, industry and government together, then we shouldn't be doing it.

And so we've always kept that in mind.

It's part of the DNA of the SUPE program and certainly of NASA itself.

A lot of the success of SUPE comes from the fact that I believe that I come from that NASA background.

Real quick, without going too detailed into it, when I got hired, I thought I'd be an astronomer.

And I was a little bummed out when I was told, we want to hire you to do the customer service.

But then I got put into a room with Mary Desjardins, who I collaborated with for years.

One of my big go-tos was we wrote the first program to do a 3D stereographic image, a satellite image of a hurricane.

We were working at that level of how to make imaging work, how to combine it with... with the weather data that was coming in and how to make it visible to the scientists so they could work with it.

And I went on to do that type of work in database, in the data centers for NASA, and in the supercomputing facilities at NASA.

So I had a lot of technical background.

And I know I'm mostly for soup now.