Summary
After 5 years with Amazon Fresh, I had the opportunity to take my expertise and lead UX for this new secret project to bring pharmacutical sales to Amazon. Following the acquistion of Pillpack in June 2018, I joined the team in February 2019 and commited to make Amazon Pharmacy the World's Most Customer-centric Pharmacy, nationwide. I was excited to take on this challenge because 1) I had the experience with leading the launch of Amazon Fresh and knew I was benefit the launch, and 2) my wife is a Nurse Practitioner and I have always enjoyed our discussions around tech in healthcare and immediately saw the impact this effort would make to millions of Amazon customers.
Trained and presented to SVPs across Amazon in first 2 weeks
After joining the team, and following a week-long visit and training at Pillpack's headquarters in Massachutes as well as one of their fulfillment centers in New Hampshire, I was asked to jump in and start adding value immediately. In order to make sure that we had proper approvals across Amazon teams, I was asked to build upon previous high-level flows to provide high-fidelity flows that represented our MLP (minimal, loveable product). In order to meet the timeline, I proposed and gained buy-in to focuson a narrow use-case of when customers already had a prescription. Building on my previous experience with cart, checkout, and fulfillment at Amazon Fresh, I was able to quickly jump in and create a baseline design and flow that incorporated Amazon best practices as well as improvements. Once the team was aligned I created a presentation and printout of designs an rationale, led the presentation of those artifacts, and gained key approval to move forward.
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Allowing customers to checkout without insurance
I then started to dig into the vast complexity of insurance pricing. We had defined early on that Amazon Pharmacy wanted to be different from other online pharmacies. We want the ability to surface pricing to be able to shop for medications in the same way you could search for other things on Amazon. However, pricing for prescriptions are based on each insurance company's pricing formularly and is constantly changing. We considered showing ranges for insurance pricing, but had previous research to show that ranges weren't preferred by customers because they could be a very wide range that wasn't helpful in making a decision. That led me to realize that we didnt need a prescription to show the cash price and this unlocked the ability to shop, browse prices, and allow customers to easily make a decision on their preferred medication.
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Later in the project, leadership aspired to also be competitive with GoodRx, an online discount pharmacy card that allows customers to see deeply discounted pricing at their local pharmacies. This strategy is basically just offering the cash price to a customer without utilizing insurance, which can sometimes be much less than what the insurance company charges. By allowing for cash price to be shown by default, it easily scaled to allow for Amazon to introduce their own discount card as part of their overall Prime membership strategy.
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Prevent customers from checking out without a prescription
Building on previous work, it was time to dig into the use-case where customers requested a new prescription. This was a complete paradigm shift as our customers could now shop and suggest medications or request refills or renewals to their prescriber. After reviewing work flows for how our operations staffing would chase new prescriptions, it became clear that leadership's desire to automatically let customers checkout without prescriptions would yield a great deal of negative paths for 80% of all customers. I was up for the challenge to find a novel way to allow for this, but I also recalled lessons learned from my experience with Amazon Fresh and that we tried to do too much and ended up needing to scale back in the end. Given that we wanted to go to market within the year, I suggested that we gate customers from checking out until a prescription was on file, and treat a post-purchase chase flow as a phase 2. Further, we found that this approach would drastically improve the scalability of our chase operations flow allowing us to reduce labor costs in half. We quickly gained buy-in from our SVP.
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Shipment consolidation (a matrix of logic)
Next up was our post order experience. New to me was tackling how some orders might be split up based on ship date and how others might be consolidated for the same reason. It was nuance of the Amazon logistical process that I had missed out on at Amazon Fresh as they were singular deliveries, all arriving at the same time. I worked closely with our senior developers on this highly technical component. It was clear to me that orders and shipments became quite disconnected, especially from the original checkout. In the end, I was able to present a clear architecture that allowed the most scalability.
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Brought Agile to Amazon Pharmacy UX
I also advocated for our transition away from waterfall methodology to a more lean, Agile methodology. Again, pulling from much of my past alongside known inefficiencies in our communication process, I stood up an Agile function with documentation, and gained buy-in to launch across all of our UX efforts. The success of this function allowed us to scale work across the team, meet deadlines (including our overall launch), and I was able to hire for an pass along this work to a devoted Senior UX programmer.
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Unique Pharmacy store experience on app
Knowing that mobile traffic was a large percentage of overall traffic and purchasing, I continued to build a case that we should highly consider our app strategy. Having pursued a "Store Mode" or "app-within-an-app" strategy since I was at Amazon Fresh, I realized that Amazon Pharmacy would benefit from a walled off experience due to it's independent cart, profile, payment, etc. plus the fact that Pharmacy would need to have a clear demarcation line for personal health information (PHI). Similar to Amazon Fresh launch, I recalled that all of the big moves we made were at launch and subsequently it was more and more difficult to launch large sweeping updates, so figured if the effort was low enough, we could and should pursue it. I worked with another UX teammate to implment a design sprint with Product, UX, and tech to define whether this course of action was actually feasible in the timeline we had. We worked with the internal team that supported the store mode functionality and were able to present an argument compelling enough to get both our leadership as well as their leadership commited to the effort.
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Revised Dashboard, new Medication Information Page, and improved flow
Mid-way through the project, I had a gnawing issue with our V1 dashboard (which was outside of my direct area of ownership). When I walked through the flows, I found myself identifying redundancies, inconsistencies, and confusing flows that I knew would stump our customers. I kept pushing for an opportunity to simplify with my manager and other key stakeholders. Knowing that we were nearing the cutoff date for design chances, I took the time to draw up a flow of the proposed changes in order to better communicate the problems I was seeing. With this, I was able to gain alignment across the team and get approval from our leadership to move forward.
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Mid-way through the project, I had a gnawing issue with our V1 dashboard (which was outside of my direct area of ownership). When I walked through the flows, I found myself identifying redundancies, inconsistencies, and confusing flows that I knew would stump our customers. I kept pushing for an opportunity to simplify with my manager and other key stakeholders. Knowing that we were nearing the cutoff date for design chances, I took the time to draw up a flow of the proposed changes in order to better communicate the problems I was seeing. With this, I was able to gain alignment across the team and get approval from our leadership to move forward.
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Desktop Tiger Team
Simultaneously with working on the store app experience, revised dashboard, and consolidated deliveries, I also found out that we were not going to be able to launch a full responsive experience on time. Given that 50% of Amazon's traffic is still desktop, I knew that this was an unacceptable outcome. I had seen small Tiger Strike Team models successful in the past, so I reached out to key stakeholders to define key members across Product, Tech, and QA that could push a Minimal Loveable Product across the line. I led this group in a 1-hour weekly meeting, walking us through what we agree to as effort that would be in scope vs. not. I also managed week-to-week milestones and was able to have full end-to-end testing.
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Stepped in as UX Manager
Along with much of the above, I agreed to take over UX management for the team as my manager had maternity leave. In addition to my own project load, I managed a team of 8, including UX design, research, and writing. I also was able to review and interview hundreds of candidates, and most importantly hire 2 UX designers, 3 Senior UX designers, and 1 Senior UX Producer. I was able to accomplish this by working with recruiting and my team to change our candidate review process to weed out candidates earlier in our process, which succesfully increased the number of offers sent AND accepted by candidates.
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Launched Nationwide
On November 17, 2020 (21 months after I joined the team), we launched nationwide to the public. It now services millions of customers daily. Most importantly, it continued the flywheel set forth by Jeff Bezos in attracting more customers to Amazon and increasing their overall montly spend. It was characterized as "arguably Amazon's broadest push into the healthcare business to-date." On the day of its launch, stock prices for competitors dropped: GoodRx by 20%; Rite Aid by 16%; and Walgreens and CVS Pharmacy by 9% each. In all, drugstores, drug distributors, and health insurers lost $22 billion in market value on the day of Amazon Pharmacy's launch.
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