Our Products and Services

We’re starting our work by conducting a discovery phase. Our focus in Discovery is to learn about our users and the problems we’re trying to solve.

To that end, we’re conducting extensive user research with technologists, designers, service/program owners and others in the BC Public Service. We’re also reviewing previous research, analysis and service design work to avoid duplicative work. Finally, part of our work will involve learning about users’ needs through prototyping. We use prototyping to test for desirability, feasibility and viability.

Launchpad - our first prototype

We’re calling our first product idea Launchpad, a family of simple, boilerplate applications that are compatible with the BC Government’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) Platform. It would work by allowing users to pick their frontend, API and database from a few modern, commonly used languages and frameworks, and quickly set up and deploy a basic “Hello World” application on BC’s PaaS Platform.

We think this will help shorten the time it takes teams to deliver first versions of their digital services. Learn more about Launchpad on our mission control board. Our first two-week mission was to create a light version of a Launchpad boilerplate app and to test it with the developer community. You can find what we built here. Please try it out and send us your feedback!

While we’d love to see Launchpad take off, the product isn’t the end point. Rather, the point is to use Launchpad to learn by doing. We want to observe how technologists make decisions, what they look for when evaluating common components, and whether they’ll take up something like Launchpad. We could ask them this, but we think the real proof will be in observing behaviour when we put a component in their hands.