When President Barack Obama needed someone to lead America’s technology strategy in 2014, he did not choose a career politician or a policy specialist. He chose Megan Smith — a mechanical engineer from MIT who had spent two decades building products at Google, running acquisitions at Planet Out, co-founding a startup in the 1990s, and serving as Vice President of Google X, the company’s secretive moonshot lab. Smith became the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States, the first woman to hold the position, and she immediately set about doing what she had done throughout her career: using technology to solve problems that other people had given up on. During her tenure at the White House, she led initiatives that connected veterans with tech jobs, expanded computer science education to underrepresented communities, and brought engineering rigor to government processes that had been stuck in bureaucratic inertia for decades. But her impact extends far beyond any single role. Across every position she has held — from MIT engineering labs to Google’s most ambitious research division to the highest technology office in the United States government — Megan Smith has relentlessly championed the idea that technology works best when the people building it represent the full diversity of the people using it.
Early Life and Path to Technology
Megan Smith was born on September 10, 1964, in Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada. She grew up in a family that valued both education and public service, and from an early age she showed an aptitude for science and engineering. She pursued her undergraduate studies at MIT, earning a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1986. She then continued at MIT for her graduate work, completing a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the MIT Media Lab in 1988.
The MIT Media Lab in the late 1980s was a remarkable intellectual environment. Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner in 1985, it brought together researchers from engineering, computer science, design, and the arts to explore how emerging technologies could transform human experience. For Smith, the interdisciplinary nature of the Lab was formative. She learned to think about technology not in isolation but in the context of human needs, social systems, and creative possibility. This perspective — technology as a tool for human empowerment rather than an end in itself — would define her entire career.
After MIT, Smith took a path that was unusual for an engineer of her generation. She spent time in Japan working on engineering projects, and then moved to Australia, where she worked as a mechanical engineer. These international experiences broadened her understanding of how technology operates in different cultural and economic contexts — an understanding that would later inform her approach to technology policy at the national level. By the early 1990s, she had returned to the United States and begun moving into the technology industry that was about to transform the world.
From Planet Out to Google: Building an Engineering Career
Early Internet and Planet Out
In 1995, Smith joined PlanetOut, one of the earliest online communities for LGBTQ+ people. The mid-1990s internet was a frontier — Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was barely five years old, and the idea of building communities around shared identity online was still radical. At PlanetOut, Smith served in various leadership roles, eventually becoming CEO. She helped build the company into one of the largest LGBTQ+ media and community platforms on the internet, navigating the dot-com boom and its aftermath.
This experience at PlanetOut was significant for several reasons. It gave Smith hands-on experience running a technology company through periods of extreme growth and uncertainty. It taught her the power of technology to connect people who had been isolated or marginalized by geography and social circumstances. And it reinforced her conviction that the technology industry needed to be more inclusive — not just as a moral imperative, but as a practical requirement for building products that served all users.
Google and Google X
In 2003, Smith joined Google, which was then a fast-growing search company with fewer than 1,000 employees. Over the next decade, she rose through the ranks, eventually becoming Vice President of New Business Development, where she led Google’s acquisitions and partnerships, including the acquisition of Google Earth (originally Keyhole) and early work on Google Maps.
Her most prominent role at Google came when she was appointed Vice President of Google X (later renamed X, the moonshot factory) — the semi-secret research lab responsible for projects like self-driving cars (now Waymo), Google Glass, Project Loon (internet-delivering balloons), and other ambitious technology initiatives. At Google X, the mandate was to work on problems that could affect millions or billions of people and to approach them with technology that was radically different from existing solutions. Smith thrived in this environment. She brought her engineering rigor, her experience in business development, and her conviction that diverse teams produce better solutions.
During her time at Google, Smith was also deeply involved in the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts. She co-created the #SolveForX initiative, which brought together inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientists to discuss moonshot approaches to global challenges. She organized “Tech Women” events and worked to expand Google’s pipeline of engineers from underrepresented groups. These were not side projects for Smith — they were integral to her understanding of how technology companies should operate. As she observed, many of the world’s most significant technical challenges require perspectives that come only from diverse teams. A team building healthcare technology needs people who understand different patient populations. A team building AI assistants needs people who understand different languages, cultures, and communication styles.
Chief Technology Officer of the United States
Bringing Engineering to Government
On September 4, 2014, President Obama appointed Megan Smith as the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States, succeeding Todd Park. She was the first woman to hold the position, joining a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that was responsible for advising the President on technology issues, coordinating federal technology initiatives, and ensuring that the government leveraged technology effectively for the public good.
Smith’s approach to the CTO role was shaped by her engineering background. She treated government technology problems the way she would treat engineering problems: by breaking them into components, identifying key constraints, assembling the right teams, and iterating toward solutions. Her first observation was that the federal government had enormous technical talent scattered across agencies but lacked mechanisms for directing that expertise toward high-priority problems.
To address this, Smith expanded the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brought experienced technologists from the private sector into government for short-term stints to work on specific challenges. She also helped grow the U.S. Digital Service (USDS), which had been created in the aftermath of the Healthcare.gov launch failures to bring modern software development practices to government IT projects. Under Smith’s leadership, the USDS recruited engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon and deployed them to agencies that were struggling with outdated technology systems.
# Example: The kind of open data initiative Smith championed at the White House
# The DATA Act (Digital Accountability and Transparency Act) required
# federal agencies to publish spending data in a standardized format.
# Smith pushed for machine-readable, open data formats.
# Simplified structure of federal spending data
# that Smith's team helped standardize:
import json
from datetime import datetime
class FederalSpendingRecord:
"""
Standardized federal spending record format.
Smith championed open data standards that made
government spending transparent and machine-readable.
"""
def __init__(self, agency, program, amount, fiscal_year):
self.agency = agency
self.program = program
self.amount = amount
self.fiscal_year = fiscal_year
self.timestamp = datetime.now().isoformat()
def to_open_data(self):
"""Export as open data format for public consumption."""
return {
"agency_code": self.agency,
"program_name": self.program,
"obligation_amount": self.amount,
"fiscal_year": self.fiscal_year,
"reported_at": self.timestamp,
"schema_version": "2.0",
"data_standard": "DATA_Act_2014"
}
# Smith's vision: every government dataset accessible
# through standardized APIs, enabling civic tech innovation
def publish_to_data_gov(records):
"""
Publish records to data.gov in open format.
The White House under Smith's tech leadership pushed
for over 200,000 government datasets to be publicly available.
"""
open_records = [r.to_open_data() for r in records]
dataset = {
"metadata": {
"publisher": "U.S. Federal Government",
"access_level": "public",
"license": "Creative Commons Zero",
"update_frequency": "quarterly"
},
"records": open_records,
"total_count": len(open_records)
}
return json.dumps(dataset, indent=2)
# This approach transformed government transparency:
# citizens, journalists, and researchers could now
# programmatically analyze federal spending patterns
print("Open data initiative: making government machine-readable")Key Initiatives and Impact
Smith led or significantly contributed to several landmark technology initiatives during her White House tenure from 2014 to 2017. The TechHire initiative, launched in 2015, was designed to create pathways to technology jobs for Americans who lacked traditional four-year computer science degrees. Smith recognized that the technology sector’s talent pipeline was too narrow — relying primarily on graduates of elite university programs — and that broadening this pipeline would both address the tech industry’s labor shortage and create economic opportunity for underserved communities. TechHire brought together cities, employers, and training providers to create accelerated training programs in software development, web development, IT support, and data analysis.
The Computer Science for All initiative, announced by President Obama in January 2016, aimed to expand access to computer science education in K-12 schools across the country. Smith was a driving force behind this effort, arguing that computer science was as fundamental to modern literacy as reading and mathematics. The initiative allocated funding for teacher training, curriculum development, and partnerships between schools and technology companies. Smith personally lobbied governors, mayors, and school superintendents, and she organized events that brought students from underrepresented communities to the White House to showcase their coding projects.
Smith also championed the use of technology to address systemic social challenges. She led efforts to apply data science and engineering to problems like criminal justice reform, helping agencies use data to identify patterns of inequity in sentencing and policing. She pushed for the government to adopt modern cybersecurity practices, arguing that outdated IT systems represented both an efficiency problem and a national security vulnerability. And she worked to ensure that the federal government’s growing use of algorithmic decision-making was subject to scrutiny for bias and fairness — an issue that would become even more pressing in subsequent years as AI systems became more prevalent.
Technology Inclusion and the Hidden Figures Campaign
Throughout her career, one of Smith’s most consistent and passionate commitments has been to recovering and amplifying the stories of women and people of color who made foundational contributions to technology but were overlooked or erased from the historical record. She has frequently cited the work of Grace Hopper, who invented the first compiler; Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician whose orbital calculations were critical to the Mercury and Apollo programs; and many others whose contributions were essential to modern technology.
Smith was an early and vocal supporter of the book and film “Hidden Figures,” which told the story of the African-American women mathematicians at NASA. She used her platform as U.S. CTO to draw attention to these stories, arguing that the erasure of diverse contributions from the history of technology had real consequences: it narrowed young people’s sense of who could be a technologist and limited the industry’s ability to attract and retain talent from all backgrounds.
This was not merely advocacy for Smith — it was an engineering argument. She consistently framed diversity and inclusion in terms of problem-solving effectiveness. Homogeneous teams, she argued, suffer from shared blind spots. They build products that work well for people like themselves and fail for everyone else. Diverse teams bring different experiences, different failure modes, different edge cases to the design process, and therefore produce more robust, more universally useful technology. This argument resonated in the technology industry, where the concept of “edge cases” — unusual inputs or conditions that cause systems to fail — is well understood. Smith effectively argued that a lack of diversity in engineering teams creates systematic edge-case blindness.
Post-White House: shift7 and Ongoing Impact
After leaving the White House in January 2017, Smith founded shift7, a technology-focused company and consultancy dedicated to using technology and collaboration to drive inclusion and solve systemic problems. The name reflects her engineering mindset: “shift” refers to transformation, and “7” represents the idea of impact across all sectors of society.
At shift7, Smith has continued the work she began at the White House and at Google, focusing on projects that sit at the intersection of technology, social impact, and systemic change. She has worked with organizations on applying agile methodologies and modern product management practices to social-impact initiatives. She has advised companies on diversity and inclusion strategies that go beyond surface-level commitments. And she has continued to champion computer science education and STEM access for underrepresented communities.
Smith has also served on numerous boards and advisory committees, including the MIT Corporation (MIT’s governing board) and the Vital Voices Global Partnership. Her influence extends through the networks she has built across government, industry, academia, and the nonprofit sector.
/* Smith's approach to inclusive technology development */
/* can be modeled as a systematic engineering process: */
/*
The shift7 methodology mirrors modern product development
but explicitly incorporates diversity at every stage.
This is how Smith's framework translates into practice
for teams building technology products and services.
*/
class InclusiveTechProcess {
constructor(projectName) {
this.project = projectName;
this.stakeholders = [];
this.blindSpots = [];
this.accessibilityChecks = [];
}
// Step 1: Assemble a team that reflects the user base
assembleTeam(teamMembers) {
const demographics = this.analyzeDiversity(teamMembers);
const userBase = this.getUserBaseDemographics();
const gaps = this.identifyRepresentationGaps(demographics, userBase);
if (gaps.length > 0) {
console.log(`Representation gaps found: ${gaps.join(', ')}`);
console.log('Action: expand recruiting, add advisory voices');
}
return gaps;
}
// Step 2: Systematic edge-case discovery
// Smith's core insight: diverse teams find more edge cases
discoverEdgeCases(userStories) {
const standardCases = userStories.filter(s => s.type === 'standard');
const edgeCases = userStories.filter(s => s.type === 'edge');
const accessibilityCases = userStories.filter(s => s.type === 'a11y');
// Teams lacking diversity consistently miss these categories:
// - Accessibility requirements (screen readers, motor disabilities)
// - Localization edge cases (RTL languages, non-Latin scripts)
// - Socioeconomic factors (low bandwidth, older devices)
// - Cultural context (naming conventions, imagery meanings)
return {
coverage: (edgeCases.length + accessibilityCases.length) /
(standardCases.length + edgeCases.length + accessibilityCases.length),
gaps: this.findMissingPerspectives(userStories)
};
}
// Step 3: Build with open data and transparency in mind
// Reflecting Smith's White House open data advocacy
ensureTransparency(systemDesign) {
return {
dataAccessible: systemDesign.hasOpenAPI,
algorithmDocumented: systemDesign.hasBiasAudit,
feedbackLoop: systemDesign.hasUserFeedbackChannel,
publicReporting: systemDesign.hasImpactMetrics
};
}
}
// Smith's philosophy in one line:
// "You can't build great technology for everyone
// if everyone isn't in the room when you build it."Philosophy and Engineering Approach
Key Principles
Smith’s approach to technology is rooted in several interconnected principles that reflect both her engineering training and her decades of experience building products, leading teams, and setting policy. First, she believes that technology is a tool for solving human problems, not an end in itself. This may sound obvious, but in an industry frequently driven by technical novelty — building things because they are technically interesting rather than because they solve real needs — it is a meaningful distinction. Smith consistently asks not “What can we build?” but “What needs to be solved, and how can technology help?”
Second, she is deeply committed to the principle that diverse teams build better technology. This is not, for Smith, a matter of corporate social responsibility or public relations. It is an engineering observation: teams with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives identify more failure modes, consider more use cases, and produce more robust systems. She has applied this principle everywhere she has worked, from Google X to the White House to shift7.
Third, Smith believes in the power of open data and transparency. Her work at the White House on open data initiatives and her long-standing advocacy for government technology transparency reflect a conviction that information should be accessible and that public institutions should be accountable through their data. For teams working with modern project management tools like Taskee, this principle of transparency translates directly into practices like open dashboards, shared progress metrics, and accessible documentation.
Fourth, she is a systems thinker. Rather than addressing problems in isolation, Smith looks for leverage points where a single intervention can create cascading positive effects. The Computer Science for All initiative is a good example: by expanding access to CS education at the K-12 level, Smith aimed to transform the pipeline of future technologists, which would in turn change the demographics of the technology workforce, which would in turn change the kinds of products and services that get built. This cascading logic — intervene at the root cause rather than treating symptoms — is characteristic of how engineers approach complex systems, and it is central to Smith’s methodology.
Why It Mattered
Smith’s influence is difficult to quantify because it operates at multiple levels simultaneously. At the individual level, the programs she championed — TechHire, Computer Science for All, the Presidential Innovation Fellows — directly affected thousands of people by creating pathways to technology careers and expanding access to computer science education. At the organizational level, her work at Google and the White House demonstrated that diversity and inclusion could be approached with the same rigor and intentionality that engineers apply to any other design constraint. At the systemic level, her advocacy for open data, transparent government technology, and inclusive design practices has influenced how technology companies and government agencies think about their obligations to the public.
The organizations she has built or strengthened — from USDS to shift7 — continue to advance her agenda. The U.S. Digital Service, which she helped expand, has become a permanent feature of the federal government, deploying technologists to agencies and modernizing government IT systems. The open data standards she championed have made government spending, environmental data, and public health information more accessible to researchers, journalists, and citizens. Building digital services at this scale is a challenge comparable to managing complex enterprise platforms, requiring the kind of structured approaches that agencies like Toimi bring to large-scale web development and digital strategy.
Legacy and Modern Relevance
Megan Smith’s career represents a model for how technologists can operate at the intersection of engineering, business, and public policy. In an era when the technology industry is increasingly scrutinized for its social impact — from algorithmic bias to data privacy to the concentration of economic power — Smith’s career offers a blueprint for engaged, responsible technology leadership.
Her insistence on diverse teams is more relevant than ever. As AI systems are deployed in high-stakes domains like healthcare, criminal justice, and hiring, the consequences of building technology without diverse input are becoming painfully visible. Facial recognition systems that fail on dark-skinned faces, hiring algorithms that discriminate against women, health monitoring devices that do not work properly on non-white skin — these are exactly the kinds of failures that Smith has spent her career trying to prevent, and they are a direct result of the homogeneity she has consistently warned against.
Her advocacy for computer science education has had lasting effects. The CS for All movement she championed has expanded to thousands of schools, and the idea that every student should have access to computer science education is now widely accepted — a shift from just a decade ago, when CS was considered a specialized subject rather than a fundamental literacy. Today, as more organizations embrace modern web frameworks and digital-first approaches, the demand for broadly trained technologists continues to grow, validating Smith’s vision of a more inclusive pipeline.
Her open data work anticipated and helped shape the current emphasis on transparency and accountability in government technology. As governments around the world grapple with questions about how to regulate AI, how to protect citizen data, and how to modernize public services, the frameworks Smith helped establish provide a foundation that policymakers continue to build on.
Smith remains active through shift7 and her board roles. Her career trajectory — from MIT engineering student to Google VP to U.S. CTO to social-impact entrepreneur — demonstrates that technical excellence and social commitment are not just compatible but mutually reinforcing. The approach she has modeled — bringing engineering rigor, systems thinking, and an insistence on diversity to every problem — is one that the technology industry increasingly recognizes it needs.
Key Facts
- Born: September 10, 1964, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada
- Education: BS in Mechanical Engineering (MIT, 1986), MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT Media Lab (1988)
- Known for: 3rd U.S. Chief Technology Officer, first woman in the role; Google VP and VP of Google X; tech inclusion advocate
- Key roles: CEO of PlanetOut, VP at Google (2003-2014), U.S. CTO (2014-2017), Founder of shift7 (2017-present)
- Major initiatives: TechHire, Computer Science for All (CS4All), Presidential Innovation Fellows expansion, U.S. Digital Service growth, open data standards
- Recognition: Forbes Most Powerful Women in Technology, Fast Company Most Creative People in Business, numerous honorary degrees
- Key principle: Diverse teams build better technology — inclusion is an engineering requirement, not just a social goal
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Megan Smith?
Megan Smith is an American engineer, technology executive, and public servant who served as the third Chief Technology Officer of the United States from 2014 to 2017 — the first woman to hold the position. Before joining the White House, she spent over a decade at Google, where she served as Vice President of New Business Development and Vice President of Google X (the moonshot lab). She holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. After leaving government, she founded shift7, a company focused on using technology and collaboration to drive inclusion and systemic change. Throughout her career, she has been one of the technology industry’s most prominent advocates for diversity, inclusive design, and the principle that technology works best when built by teams that reflect the diversity of the people it serves.
What did Megan Smith accomplish as U.S. CTO?
As U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Smith led several major initiatives. She expanded the Presidential Innovation Fellows program and helped grow the U.S. Digital Service, bringing private-sector engineers into government to modernize federal IT systems. She championed the TechHire initiative, which created pathways to technology jobs for Americans without traditional four-year degrees. She was a driving force behind Computer Science for All, a national initiative to expand CS education in K-12 schools. She pushed for open data standards that made government spending and public datasets machine-readable and publicly accessible. She also led efforts to apply data science to systemic challenges like criminal justice reform and cybersecurity.
Why is Megan Smith important to the technology industry?
Smith is important because she has consistently demonstrated that diversity and inclusion in technology are engineering imperatives, not just social ideals. Her career across private industry, government, and social enterprise has shown that diverse teams produce more robust technology, that open data and transparency improve public trust, and that expanding access to technical education strengthens the entire technology ecosystem. Her work recovering the stories of overlooked technology pioneers — particularly women and people of color — has helped broaden the public understanding of who builds technology and who should build technology.
What is shift7?
shift7 is the company Megan Smith founded in 2017 after leaving her role as U.S. CTO. It is a technology-focused consultancy and venture dedicated to using technology, collaboration, and inclusive practices to drive systemic change. The company works with organizations on applying modern engineering and product management practices to social-impact initiatives, advises on diversity and inclusion strategies, and continues Smith’s long-standing commitment to expanding access to technology careers and education. The name reflects Smith’s engineering mindset: “shift” represents transformation, and “7” represents impact across all sectors of society.
What was Megan Smith’s role at Google?
Smith joined Google in 2003 and spent over a decade at the company in increasingly senior roles. She served as Vice President of New Business Development, leading major acquisitions including the technology that became Google Earth. She later became Vice President of Google X (now simply X), the semi-secret moonshot lab responsible for self-driving cars, Project Loon, Google Glass, and other ambitious initiatives. Throughout her time at Google, she was deeply involved in diversity and inclusion efforts and co-created the SolveForX initiative for moonshot thinking about global challenges.
