Modernizing how the Air Force delivers weather intelligence
Summary
We’re partnering with the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Weather Systems Program Office (WxPO) to modernize how the Department of Defense (DoD) delivers weather intelligence — migrating more than 75 applications to the cloud while building the design and delivery capabilities to sustain the transformation. Our engagement spans cloud migration, design capability building, platform redesign, and data management.
The challenge
The DoD relies on WxPO to deliver terrestrial and space weather intelligence around the clock. Forecasters, pilots, air traffic controllers, and intelligence professionals use WxPO’s applications to predict weather patterns, prepare mission briefings, and communicate hazardous conditions. When weather tools are slow, fragmented, or unreliable, the consequences reach the flight line.
WxPO maintained a portfolio of more than 75 applications and services — most built over decades for on-premises environments. These legacy systems weren’t designed to work together. Users toggled between disconnected tools, reconciled data by hand, and relied on workarounds that had calcified into routine. Deploying updates was slow, integration across systems was minimal, and problems could go undetected until they surfaced in operations.
In 2017, WxPO launched a plan to migrate its entire portfolio to the cloud and consolidate user-facing tools into a single platform called BIFROST. The migration promised better scalability and resilience, but it also required rethinking how users experienced weather tools end to end — not just lifting existing applications into a new environment, but fundamentally redesigning workflows, data delivery, and the user experience.
WxPO didn’t yet have the internal capacity for that kind of transformation. Design was severely understaffed, teams worked in silos, and user feedback came after features shipped rather than before. The organization had the ambition and the mandate, but not the practices, tooling, or team structures to deliver at the scale the migration demanded.
The solution
WxPO engaged us through BESPIN to bring user-centered design and delivery expertise to the modernization effort. We’ve worked with WxPO across multiple workstreams over several years — each one building on the last to address a different dimension of the challenge.
We started with service design to diagnose what was stalling the migration. Rather than jumping to technical solutions, we applied our Service Design Accelerator to understand the organizational dynamics holding teams back — identifying eight priority areas and embedding alongside WxPO staff to tackle each one while building their capacity to sustain progress independently.
With the migration unblocked, we turned to building the design capability WxPO needed to deliver modern user experiences. Using a player-coach model within WARPspeed — WxPO’s software factory — we embedded designers and product managers on delivery teams, introduced modern tooling and a shared design system, and strengthened delivery operations across the organization.
A functioning design practice made it possible to consolidate legacy workflows into BIFROST — redesigning critical weather tools for forecasters, pilots, and mission planners while embedding repeatable research practices and rebuilding trust with a user community skeptical of modernization promises.
In parallel, we addressed a data infrastructure gap by building a searchable data catalog that replaced manual spreadsheets with an intuitive application for discovering data products, managing subscriptions, and diagnosing delivery issues.
The results
- Accelerated WxPO’s cloud migration by identifying and addressing eight priority improvement areas through service design, unblocking a transformation that had stalled organizationally
- Built user-centered design and product management capability across multiple WARPspeed teams, growing the organization from one designer to a functioning design practice with modern tooling, a shared design system, and a community of practice
- Redesigned critical BIFROST workflows — including Watches, Warnings, and Advisories and mission briefings — streamlining operations for DoD forecasters, pilots, and mission planners
- Replaced 100,000+ row spreadsheets with a searchable data catalog application, giving WxPO visibility into the full data delivery chain for the first time
- Embedded sustainable practices — user research, accessibility, agile product management, design handoffs — that WxPO teams continue to use and grow independently