The future doesn’t belong to those who wait—it belongs to those who build. In this powerful closing keynote from Prodacity 2025, Bryon Kroger, Founder & CEO of Rise8, delivers a call to action for digital transformation, continuous delivery, and overcoming bureaucracy in government software.

Kroger challenges attendees to push past resistance, transform broken systems, and take bold personal risks to continuously deliver software that users love. He shares how high-performing teams beat bureaucracy, how mission-driven work makes an impact, and why software companies—not defense contractors—should be building the future.

🔹 Key Topics Covered:

• Why bureaucracy isn’t an excuse—it’s a challenge to overcome
• How high-performing teams drive change in government tech
• The real meaning of continuous delivery & why it must come first
• Why mission-driven software delivery is measured in lives saved
• How software companies—not traditional contractors—should be building our future
• The Prodacity movement: A call to action for the GovTech community

🕒 Key Highlights & Timestamps:
[00:03] - Introduction: Overcoming the curse of Sisyphus in GovTech
[00:52] - The Great Man Theory & why heroes don’t scale—teams do
[01:53] - The paradox of belief: If you think you can’t change the world, you won’t
[03:26] - How to push back against bureaucracy and build momentum
[04:18] - The power of symbolism & the paper airplane challenge
[05:10] - Why software companies should build our aircraft & defense systems
[06:01] - What makes Prodacity a movement—not just an event
[06:49] - The final challenge: Ship something. Build something. Own the future.

🔗 Stay Connected:
Learn more about Prodacity: https://www.rise8.us/prodacity
Follow us on X: https://x.com/Rise8_Inc
Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rise8/

👍 Like, Subscribe, and Share:
If you’re tackling government IT modernization, continuous delivery, or breaking down bureaucracy, give this video a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel, and share it with your network. Transformation isn’t a theory—it’s a movement. Let’s build.

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Bryon Kroger (00:03):

As we close out here, I want to touch on something Paul Gaffney said that hit me pretty hard. I think he's right. We don't need to resign ourselves to being Sisyphus. And so if I could go back to my earlier statement, your Sisyphus do hard things. The clarification I want to provide is when I said, Hey, let's all start pushing stones up the hill, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. It's like an overwhelming force against the bureaucracy to overcome that curse of Sisyphus. And to do that, we need a heroic community full of heroic teams, but not heroes. And who's heard the great man theory or great heroes theory. It's this idea that history is largely shaped by the emergence of heroes.

(00:52):

I think one aspect of that great hero theory is right and one aspect is wrong. I think what it gets right is that, or maybe I'll start with what it gets wrong actually. I think one thing that it gets wrong is heroes aren't the answer. Or maybe what I agree with is that heroes do emerge, but what's heroic about them is actually that they unleash teams. So if you go back and look at all of these great heroes of history, almost all of them practice some form of mission command. And what they were really doing was empowering great teams to do great things. So were they heroes in that sense? Certainly they overcame the dominance, the dominator hierarchy that Paul talked about. But what they really did was allowed teams to function. And that's what we need to do. But the issue that people often take with the great areas of history theory is the idea that people can actually change the world and they're right and they're wrong.

(01:53):

The paradox of negative belief statements is that, I mean, if you believe that you can't change the world, you'll be right and that you won't ever change the world. But if you believe that teams and communities can change the world, you'll have the opportunity to do so. Our mission here, our contribution to making the world better is very specific. We deliver a world where fewer bad things happen because of bad software. So let's recap how we can push the stone up each one of our mountains and overwhelm this govtech transformation curse. So this is actually a perfect graphic for it because it's like pushing a stone up a hill. You got to understand where you're going. We talked a lot about vision and strategy and getting people aligned to those. We talked about grasping the current condition, using things like value stream mapping, domain-driven design, and using that to inform what are next most valuable things to do are not just the next one, but making sure that it's aligned to where we're headed. And once we do that, we can conduct experiments to get there. And we talked about all the things you need to have in place to do that. You need to be really good at delivering software. You need a really great platform. You need to unblock your path to production. Then you need to continue to employ that value stream. Mapping, domain driven design. Every time you ship something, you change the value stream, you make it better. You have to keep iterating, and that's it. It's that simple, right?

(03:26):

But really, if every one of us keeps doing this over and over and over again as a community, as helping each other, when it starts rolling back down the hill, because it will, we'll get there. Now, before I transition to our activity, we also want to continuously improve our event. So I would really appreciate you shipping us some feedback. Be candid, be specific. We love that. I'll share this in the Slack channel too if you didn't get to it. But our next activity is we're going to ship something. So you've got a piece of paper, some of you have already started folding it. I had to pre-fold mine because I can't talk and fold at the same time. But I want to tell you the story of this plane. So go ahead and start folding your plane, and if you get that done, there'll be a spot on the bottom right here to write what you're going to ship and what it's going to impact.

(04:18):

But at Rise8, I'm really big into symbolism. Some of you know it's Fall Seven, Rise Eight is a Japanese proverb about transformation. So this little two ship formation is something I think about a lot. It symbolizes pairing for us at Rise8. It's us pairing with the government. But there's something interesting going on here besides it being a two ship. The paper plane represents the concept of an MVP or that first iteration of value, but underneath it, it's casting a shadow of a fighter jet callback to my Air Force times, but also foreshadowing this idea. My dear friend Matt Nelson, he's the CTO over at BESPIN, he once said, we're always hiring airplane companies to build our software. Maybe we should hire software companies to build our software. And I want to take that a step further and say maybe someday software companies will build our airplanes.

(05:10):

And when we do that, we'll really be a lean government enterprise. And so one of my dreams is that eventually software companies emerge that not only ship really great software from MVP to really great systems of systems, but they start building our airplanes and our rocket ships just like they're building our cars today. So, okay, over the past three days, we've explored what it truly means to transform not just our organizations, but the way we think, build and lead. We've challenged assumptions, unlearned old habits, and embrace new ways to drive impact at scale. But Prodacity, it's not just three days away at Category 10 in Nashville, although it's been a pretty cool venue, I would say pretty good place to meet. I really want it to be a movement. And transformation can't happen in a vacuum. It happens when we take what we've learned and put it into action.

(06:01):

So here's my challenge to you. Start where you are. Take one insight, one framework, one conversation that resonated with you this week and do something with it. Whether it's rethinking how you approach delivery, challenging the status quo in your organization or bring you more intentionality to your own leadership, move forward. And you don't have to do it alone. The Prodacity community doesn't end here. We'll continue to put on events, but we're also going to keep the Slack channel open. We'll add channels for discussions that are important to you and try to keep the conversation going between events. Please keep learning. Share your experiences with us as a community because the future doesn't belong to those who wait. It belongs to those that build. So let's build and ship something together. Keep folding airplanes. If you could go ahead and play that video one last time.

(06:49):

Prodacity, a willingness to take bold personal risks to continuously deliver software that users love into production. Having bravery where code meets courage and creation knows no bounds. What we do is about more than bits, byts and lines of code. It's about the people we serve and the critical outcomes that impact their lives every day. A calling to rise with conviction. This is more than a job, and the people we serve are more than just users because what they do is measured in lives, saved disasters, averted soldiers returning home. We deploy innovation in the defense of democracy and to get our defenders home safely. We embrace our duty to care for them after their mission is over, whether they're on the battlefield or the operating table, a cross country flight, or the Crosstown Expressway, we have a responsibility to deliver in their hour of need and our biggest mission of all delivering the future. They fought for a vision. We all share a democracy that can serve its people in a digital era, a government where nothing is impossible.

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