Case Study

Impact stats

• 24 Nava staff have more than three years of direct experience working on PFML programs

• Over 170 Nava staff have gained PFML experience in the past five years

Six years ago, Nava won its first prime contract working on paid family and medical leave (PFML) services when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts tapped us to help build and maintain their brand new PFML program. In 2024, we won prime positions helping two more states build their PFML programs, making us a prime contractor on three of the 14 PFML implementations nationwide. 

We owe much of our success to our partners at the Massachusetts Department of Family and Medical Leave (DFML) for demonstrating what it means to implement a gold-standard PFML program and for trusting us to help build and maintain this complex system. DFML is leading the way in iterative and human-centered development, which is why their PFML program has been so effective. As of July 2025, the program has paid out approximately $4 billion in benefits to more than 500,000 applicants.  

Staffing our teams with seasoned experts

Our longstanding work with DFML has enabled us to cultivate a strong talent pool of PFML delivery experts that can hit the ground running on new projects. 24 Nava staff started working on PFML programs more than three years ago, and nearly 30% of our company has directly worked on PFML projects in the past five years. Spread across our trio of PFML projects, this talent pool of senior, trusted leaders means that each government partner — including Massachusetts — benefits from a powerful mix of program expertise, innovation, and continuous improvement. Nava staff work closely with our partners’ experience and product owners, and our depth of expertise means we can quickly work within our partners’ constraints, whether it’s a hiring freeze, changes to strategic priorities, limits on internal capacity, unknown obstacles, or other vendors failing to deliver up-to-par. Our talent model has also helped us alleviate naive, time-consuming, or “one-size-fits-all” delivery mistakes while working toward legislative deadlines that are often inflexible. 

When Nava hires new employees, we screen for mission fit at every stage of the hiring process. This ensures that our teams consist of people who care about outcomes over tasks and procedures — an essential component of building digital services that people trust. 

After Massachusetts’ PFML program launched in 2021, we adjusted the structure of our scrum teams to maximize value and strengthen autonomy across teams. Based on the concept of team topologies — an organizational model that prioritizes delivering value quickly — we realigned scrum teams around the applicant, employer, staff, and payments experiences and empowered each team to build their own product roadmaps. This methodology proved successful, so we scaled it to our partnerships with other states.

On all of our PFML projects, we ensure each scrum team has the right mix of skills and the right ratio of designers to engineers. In concert with applying the team topology model, offering our partners teams with robust skill sets has enabled them to scale up quickly and fire on all cylinders faster. For example, we successfully scaled from seven employees on one scrum team to over 70 employees across 10 scrum teams on our Minnesota project in less than five months. 

Lastly, we continue to invest in retention strategies for our company’s top talent. When scrum team lead positions open, we default to elevating an existing PFML teammate into the role, rather than bringing on someone without PFML expertise. When we compete for PFML work in new states, we name key personnel that have prior PFML expertise, offering the growth opportunity to Nava’s highest performers. 

We’ve also created the brand new senior leadership roles of PFML Principal Specialists for each discipline as well as the new Program Director for PFML projects role. These new positions allow Nava to deepen its PFML program expertise, and they expose all delivery teams to government relationship and leadership approaches that have proven successful over the past four years. 

Saving months of time jumpstarting projects

Through the years, our expert delivery staff have honed and iterated on best practices that generally apply across PFML programs, all while keeping up with cutting edge technology in our industry. This has enabled us to develop modular tools and templates that help our government partners accelerate prototyping and deliver tangible, positive outcomes in weeks, not months. For instance, we estimate this strategy helped save a team of roughly three engineers 17 weeks setting up production-ready infrastructure and an employer exemption application for Minnesota’s Paid Leave program.

“We’ve established a product management function to support delivery alongside [our] partners. We’ve leveraged tools and accelerators that the vendor has to establish environments and start development work immediately, and we’ve developed an achievable roadmap to deliver needed experiences well in advance of the go live date.” - Senior leader in Minnesota

Working across states means we can reuse proven best practices. This is more cost-effective for tax payers and state agencies, helps applicants receive benefits as quickly as possible, and reduces burden for state agency staff.

Conclusion

We’re honored that our government partners in three states have trusted us to help build, operate, and maintain their PFML programs. Our longstanding work on PFML has enabled us to build out a robust team of PFML experts who help our partners accelerate work while meeting their program goals and constituents’ needs. 

Our talent pool — past and present — is our differentiator. We hire people who care deeply about delivering excellent PFML services during important life milestones like birth, caregiving, and serious health events. This is how we've earned the position as one of the premier PFML vendors in the country.