Govly - AI-Powered Army Acquisition Requirements Builder

Challenge

Army contracting officers face a tedious ARP development process reliant on outdated tools and individual expert knowledge. This results in long lead times, inconsistent contract quality, and difficulties in managing contracts and monitoring vendor performance, ultimately hindering the ability to deliver value quickly and effectively for soldiers.

Solution

An AI-powered collaborative platform that automates and standardizes ARP development tasks, from ingesting requirements and creating contract content to comparing past packages, defining evaluation criteria, and measuring performance. This enables faster creation of standardized, compliant, high-quality ARPs.

My Role

Product Designer, responsible for conducting extensive user research with Army contracting officers over 6 weeks, analyzing how ARP documents were filled out to inform AI generation, and creating rapid iterative prototypes using Figma and our component library. I collaborated with engineers during the 6-week development phase to ensure the final product met user needs.

Personal Takeaways

This project reinforced the critical importance of deep user research in complex government procurement environments. Spending extensive time with Army contracting officers revealed how much institutional knowledge and manual processes were creating bottlenecks. Understanding the intricacies of how each document was filled out was essential for training our AI agent effectively. I learned that designing for highly regulated, security-conscious environments requires balancing innovation with compliance, and that working within a tight 12-week timeline demanded ruthless prioritization of features that would deliver the most immediate value to users.

SITUATION

Army acquisition staff were struggling with an outdated, manual ARP development process that depended heavily on individual expertise. The lack of standardization led to inconsistent contract quality, extended lead times, and challenges in vendor performance monitoring. With a 12-week timeline (6 weeks research/design, 6 weeks development), my primary objectives were to quickly understand the root causes of these inefficiencies and design an AI-driven solution that would improve speed, quality, and consistency.

PROJECT GOALS

Design an AI-enabled collaborative system that reduces ARP development time, standardizes contract quality, improves compliance, and enables better post-award monitoring. Ultimately, this delivers better value for soldiers through quicker awards, higher-quality proposals, and fewer protests.

DESIGN APPROACH

Over 6 weeks, I conducted intensive user interviews with Army contracting officers to understand their workflows, pain points, and needs. A critical part of this research involved analyzing how each ARP document was filled out, which was essential for training our AI agent to generate documents accurately. The discovery phase revealed several critical insights:

• Heavy reliance on tribal knowledge: Individual experts held crucial information not documented in systems
• Outdated tools and processes: Manual, time-consuming tasks that couldn’t scale
• Inconsistent quality: Wide variance in ARP quality depending on who created them
• Limited visibility: Difficulty comparing current work to past successful packages
• Complex document structures: Each ARP section required specific formatting and information that needed to be understood for AI generation

Through rapid synthesis of research notes and collaboration with stakeholders, I identified opportunities to leverage Govly’s existing AI capabilities, including their extensive database of federal awards, budgets, and millions of real-time solicitation records, to automate key tasks while maintaining human oversight and control.

Using Figma and our existing component library, I created quick iterative prototypes that allowed for rapid testing and refinement. This approach enabled fast feedback cycles and ensured we could adapt designs quickly based on user input.

PROTOTYPE + TESTING

During the initial 6-week research and design phase, I leveraged Figma and our component library to create quick iterative prototypes that allowed acquisition staff to:

• Automatically generate appropriate contract types and requirements
• Compare current work against past Army successes and best practices
• Leverage AI suggestions for evaluation criteria and selection processes
• Access real-time collaboration tools for coordinating ARPs

The use of our existing component library accelerated the prototyping process, allowing me to focus on workflow and functionality rather than rebuilding UI elements from scratch. Rapid prototyping and user testing sessions validated key assumptions and informed design decisions before handoff to engineering. The tight timeline required constant collaboration and quick iteration cycles to ensure we were building the right solution.

LAUNCH + OUTCOMES

Following 6 weeks of development and engineering work, Govly successfully launched an AI-enabled ARP system for the Army. The solution enables acquisition staff to experience faster and easier creation of standardized, accurate, compliant, and high-quality ARPs, driving quicker awards, higher-quality proposals, fewer protests, improved source selection, and better post-award monitoring.

DETAILS

🔗 URL: Govly
🗓️ DATE: 12-week project (6 weeks research/design + 6 weeks development)
👨🏽‍💻 ROLE: Product Designer
🛠 TOOLS: Figma, Component library, User interviews, Rapid prototyping