| Company | Role | Skills |
|---|---|---|
| LCBO | Product Manager | Rapid Prototyping |
| Scrum Master | User Interviews | |
| Journey Mapping | ||
| Wireframing |
As part of the LCBO’s Responsible Service Program, LCBO store managers collaborate with high school administrative staff to increase store security during peak weeks of the year to discourage underage drinking. After noticing a lack of standardization in the communication process, I took the initiative to streamline the process and allow for effective communication between the two parties. Beginning with problem space analysis, I conducted user research to develop personas and customer journeys, ultimately arriving at a functional prototype that was designed with, and for, the end users.
The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) is a Canadian Crown corporation responsible for selling and distributing alcoholic beverages across Ontario. With more than 660 retail stores and 450 vendors, the LCBO’s quasi-monopoly status in Canada’s most populous province has made it the world’s largest purchaser of alcoholic beverages. With a lot at stake, the LCBO is dedicated to managing and delivering remarkable experiences to Ontarians for the world’s wines, beers, and spirits.
To stay competitive and avoid complacency despite a quasi-monopoly status, the LCBO kickstarted a new initiative with LCBO|next based out of Communitech, a Waterloo innovation hub. As the innovation lab, it’s responsible for exploring new technologies and enhancing the LCBO’s technology initiatives to solve the unique problems customers or business partners face. This means bringing fresh ideas, creative thinking, and new skills to the table and constantly learning on a day-to-day basis. With the resources of a large company and the culture and energy of a start-up, the LCBO|next lab produces ideas that have lasting impacts on the LCBO’s operations and customer experience across the province.
Co-op students are always encouraged to seek and discover new initiatives that can be tackled and one of the ideas that I came up with was tackling the problem of underage drinking. This was a brand-new idea with nothing completed by previous students, so it was important to dive right into research.
Selling alcohol responsibly is a public trust. As a Crown corporation, the LCBO is committed to prioritizing the health and well-being of Ontarians and ensuring that employees, customers, and communities are safe from harm. This is currently being mandated under the Responsible Service Program. Trained LCBO retail employees are required to refuse service to those who appear 30 or younger and fail to produce valid ID, appear intoxicated, or attempt to purchase for a minor or an impaired individual. In 2018-2019, LCBO staff challenged more than 13.1 million individuals for the above criteria, and service was refused to nearly 242,000 people with 82% for reasons of age.
This increased illegal store traffic results in LCBO store managers frequently asking high schools in the area for dates of upcoming dances, graduations, and other occasions when students and graduates might try to obtain alcohol.
We first listed out a few of our assumptions:
We also predicted some key actions that users would want the ability to do, such as social event reporting, editing social event details, allowing LCBO staff to track dates of events, and notifying LCBO staff of upcoming events.
Before we started talking to people about the project idea, we first needed a name for it. We wanted the name to be something iconic that people could easily remember, and what could be more iconic than MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), which already happened to be partnered with the LCBO as part of the Responsible Service Program. Thus, we arrived at a name for our project - Making Underage Drinking Decrease, or MUDD, as a kind of homage.
Since this project was occurring during a co-op work term, we faced the ever-present constraint of time. Being confined to a four-month work term, we were determined to at least get a bronze phase of the project out the door before the term ended so that the new co-op students could pick up the project in an easily comprehensible state.
Another constraint was that our team was kept within the confines of our own homes, as millions of others were during the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant we couldn’t conduct in-person user interviews, usability tests, or concierge tests, which could have provided us with some invaluable insights. Hosting these sessions remotely may have also influenced the transparency or accuracy of our results/findings, but we had to make the most out of the cards we were dealt.
We had a general idea of who we should be reaching out to, but who better to contact first than the LCBO’s Director of Retail Operations? After getting in contact with the Director of Retail Operations and being given helpful tips on who and how to contact some of our key stakeholders, we started our process of user interviews.
For this project, interviews were conducted with LCBO store managers from store locations throughout the province. The high-level goal was to learn how current store managers addressed the problem of underage drinking and what processes they already had in place to mitigate underage drinking.
It’s important to note for the following interviews, we asked open-ended questions and when relevant, prompted interviewees to delve deeper into their answers by asking questions such as, “Why did you do X?” or “Could you please elaborate on that?” If needed, these prompts were asked multiple times to try and uncover the root cause of an issue.
When reaching out to high school administrative staff, we ideally wanted to reach out to high schools across the province so that we could gain insights from different communities. These high schools would also need to be near LCBO locations so that relevant questions could be asked.
Conclusions
Goals and Pain Points
When reaching out to the store managers, we ideally didn’t want the stores they managed to be too close to each other. This was so that we could gain insights from different communities that could potentially have different workflows depending on the region’s demographic or community culture. We also targeted stores that were actually near high schools (near meaning less than a 15-minute drive) so that we could have a productive and relevant conversation.
Goals and Pain Points
After conducting 10 user interviews, we compiled all our notes and conclusions and created two distinct personas. The personas below are simplified versions of the personas we had developed.
Using a combination of the newly-made personas and the insights we gained from the user interviews, we were able to visualize a typical customer journey and create a journey map. Typically, this would've also been supplemented with findings from an in-person concierge test, but with the ongoing pandemic, we had to make do with what we had.
As with any company, once the Product team has an idea, we can’t simply start building it out. This is especially true for a Crown corporation where every project needed a sponsor on the corporate side who could vouch for the necessity of the project and act as a representative in the HQ tower. Working for a government organization, unfortunately, meant that there would be a multitude of hoops to jump through to get the clearance to commence software development. This would involve multiple departments such as Corporate Communications, Legal, Strategy, etc.
We wanted to first see if the product would be adopted by our target users and if it would prove to be valuable. So, we adjusted our requirements and omitted anything that involved saving sensitive/personal data to skip ahead through the regulatory process. We would cross the bridge of dealing with personal data when building out future phases of our product; only when necessary and when we knew the product would provide value for years to come. We also weren’t trying to build a retail consumer-facing product that dealt with the potentially problematic topic of underage drinking, so we could skip ahead with getting clearance from Corporate Communications as well.
Finally, I developed a product requirements document (PRD) to present to company executives, and we successfully leveraged the data we collected in our journey to get the go-ahead for the project. In the innovation lab setting, much like any start-up, companies don’t have the time and resources to build out a fancy prototype to show to stakeholders. We were looking for quick wins, and having a low-fidelity wireframe was sufficient in getting the job done.
To ensure internal team alignment, the product designer first put together a low-fidelity prototype and walked through it with our team before moving on to a more sophisticated design. For good measure, we also ran through the low-fidelity prototypes with some helpful potential users. At the lab, we manifested a user-first culture where we would involve our users as frequently as possible, to ensure that we were building the right thing. We recognized that user demands can change with time and more information, so we never hesitated to invite people to get a sneak peek and show improved iterations of our designs and user flow. This worked in our favour as well since we would constantly be receiving feedback and fine-tuning our product.
With all the measures we were taking to ensure we were building out the right product also came the concern of scope creep. Scope creep doesn’t necessarily only occur once software development begins. It can also occur in the design stage, so it was important for us to be mindful of features or capabilities we were adding through frameworks such as the RICE scoring method.
There are two users for this project: LCBO store managers and high school administrative staff. The goal is for store managers to be up-to-date and fully aware of when upcoming social events occur. It is up to the high school admin to provide this information to nearby LCBO stores. In addition to store managers reaching out to high school admins through publicly available contact information, to ease the information retrieval process, it was decided that high school admins would be given access to the portal through their school credentials.
By giving high school admins access to the portal, it allows them to not only proactively input information and eliminate the need for store managers to reach out, but it also allows for the convenient updating of information when event details change. The result would be an online calendar that can be subscribed to by LCBO store managers via existing tools such as Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar. By being subscribed to this calendar, all social events of schools within a specified region would appear in a manager’s view and be updated live.
The MVP portal was decided to only include an interface for the high school admin side. In addition to the ability to add event details, the interface includes contact details for nearby LCBO stores if a high school admin ever finds the need to contact the LCBO about a problem or specific event.
It was also understood that not all social events occurred at the corresponding high school itself. For example, prom is often held at a banquet hall outside of the high school and possibly much farther away. Because of this, details for this event would be sent to all LCBOs near the high school and the location of the banquet hall.
With this design, LCBO store managers can rest assured knowing the information they have is up-to-date and that there is no need to contact or follow up with high schools or search online for social events. The time previously spent doing these tasks can be put toward more productive things such as tightening security within stores or promoting more responsible drinking.
It is also possible to include another high school in the description for events that involve multiple schools. This kind of event would notify LCBO stores near all participating schools.
You may be wondering how we would populate the distance-dependent event information in an online calendar per LCBO store. Well, this section is just for you. If you’re not interested in the high-level logic of how we were planning on accomplishing the backend logic, feel free to skip ahead.
First, we would need a database of all the high schools and LCBO stores in Ontario and their respective addresses. If a high school and a store were within a reasonable distance, we would then call the Google Maps API to calculate the driving distance between the two points. The aspect of reasonable distance is important to note as we wanted to avoid any unnecessary processing time. Whether or not two locations are within a reasonable distance would be determined either through the provincial postal code logic or by fetching and comparing against the neighbouring regions of a given town/city.
After mapping LCBO stores to their respective high schools, we could then simply create an online calendar for every high school and every LCBO store. An LCBO store’s calendar would then subscribe to every relevant high school’s calendar to have all the events in view. An LCBO store manager would then subscribe to their respective LCBO store’s calendar.
Overall, my experience at the LCBO was beyond valuable. In four short months, I was fortunate enough to learn about and facilitate the product development process, leading a team of developers and a designer. Through this, I truly believe I hit my stride as a product manager and developed confidence in my abilities, which is priceless in such an ambiguous field as product management.
I was fortunate enough to have an amazing supervisor in Danny Ho, the Director of Innovation, who supported me the whole way and was always open to answer any questions that I had.
"Nick was an exceptional Product Manager on the LCBO Innovation team and helped shape the direction of multiple high-impact software products used by LCBO's agency and grocery partners.
He is very curious and detail oriented, and was very adept to understand business’ needs and tradeoffs in deciding product scope, roadmap, and delivery timelines that were ambitious yet feasible.
Nick is a natural at engaging designers, developers, and stakeholders, and was specifically praised by our business partners for a job well done. If you’re looking for a product manager or someone who can get projects delivered, don't hesitate to reach out to Nick!"
