The Barista Problem-> Solution MVP

I was visiting two coffee shop located within our company's buildings very frequently lately, because the employers promised employees each can have a free cup of coffee/tea per day from those coffee shop. The coffee shop was always busy and have a huge line from early morning to early afternoon before they closed.

I like every barista in those two coffee places because they are all friendly regardless of how busy they get with the huge amount of coffee order. And recently I found that they are bothered by customers who can't get the ordering order right. When a customer orders a drink, they will likely gives the barista the drink name first, and then tell the barista about the alternative milk/coffee options. The barista will end up needing to ask many more follow up questions to understand the exact drink the customer is trying to order, for example "what size? ice or hot? what is a name on the order?". In this process, each barista will be burned out very fast because they all need to repeat the same process for each customer for a long period of time. The barista themselves did learn to take rotation on roles to prevent themselves from burning out, but it is not enough.

I then invented these two pieces of paper, with sticker notes and arrows to show a ordering process that makes it clear to the customer what they should say first and what to say next to minimize the amount of following up questions. The flow goes like "Size of the drink 16Oz/12Oz/8Oz -> Iced or Hot -> Drink Name -> Alt Milk & Syrup -> And a name on the Order Please? ". I brought those two pieces to each of the coffee shops and put it in front of the counter for each customer to follow. I asked the barista to get permission and soon they realized it is a good idea. It reduced their load on asking follow up questions by a lot and they can now spend less time talking.

Not only the barista are happier, the customers too are happier. Now they don't need to get interrupted by the barista just because they didn't order in the most correct order. I collects feedbacks from the customers too, one of them let me know about long names and foreign names are difficult to be captured by the barista correctly, so that is going to be my next iteration of improvement to the project.

Unfortunately, the director of the coffee shops seems to not be interested in this idea and rejected the use of these two papers to be placed in front of the counter. I tried to engage this particular stakeholder, but it seems like they are reluctant to move forward with this idea. I am struggle with where I can take this project, but I will continue to try and get feedbacks from different stakeholders and get to some other solutions that make sense to the director.