Crisis Is Your Opening | Marina Nitze | Invisible Machines

Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine · Apr 10, 2026 · 55m

Most organizations treat crisis as a failure state. Marina Nitze sees it as a window.

Nitze served as Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs (the largest civilian agency in the country) during the healthcare.gov collapse. She helped rescue it, helped stand up the US Digital Service, and came out the other side with a question she and her colleagues have been pursuing ever since: why is it that crisis makes otherwise impossible transformational change possible?

That question became a firm, Layer Aleph, and now a book, Crisis Engineering, co-authored with her colleagues…