Challenge

In 2017, the San Francisco Office of Cannabis, recognizing that legalization of recreational cannabis signaled a future influx of permit applications, decided to reimagine the process for becoming a legal cannabis business in SF. Our team set out to create a service design that would be efficient and easy-to-use for both applicants and the city officials processing permit applications.

Key insights

The legacy permitting process was confusing and repetitive, often requiring the same information to be filled out again and again. While business owners preferred to complete forms digitally, the current process required lots of physical paper forms and visits to city departments. In the quickly changing regulation landscape, business owners sought guidance on compliance from the city.

The Solution

The final service blueprint was inspired by the input of cannabis business owners and city officials at a cross-sector workshop. The new process featured a digital process, auto-populated data, educational content to help applicants navigate the application, and a rapid feedback loop so applicants could submit parts of their application for feedback along the way.

Define

We developed personas and a current state application journey map for each type of cannabis business to help us understand the different mix of needs the various types of cannabis businesses had. We identified nine major pain points that represented areas of opportunity for the future process.

Develop

We brought together 45 city employees and cannabis business owners to imagine the ideal new process. Sitting at mixed-sector tables and working collaboratively fostered a new sense of trust between the business owners and city officials.

Deliver

We synthesized ideas from all the workshop groups into a new service blueprint. The new process featured educational content to assist with compliance, optional levels of interaction with city officials and a rapid feedback loop so applicants could work on their application iteratively, moving along the process as each form got approved. We presented our work to the Mayor of San Francisco at the Civic Bridge Demo Day and the San Francisco Office of Digital Services is working to implement this new service design by 2020.