Ashlee Richards is VP of Products at Kentucky Lottery Corporation. Coming out of high school, she served in the United States Air Force and credits her integrity, leadership, and data-informed decision-making to her career in the military. After serving, she found a love for tech working at CafePress (now PlanetArt) and had roles in marketing tech, ecommerce, and account management before settling into technical program management at International Game Technology (IGT). Ashlee then transitioned to a technical program management role at Udemy before moving to Kentucky Lottery in 2023.
In our conversation, Ashlee talks about how the legalization of sports betting has added new players to the market and changed the competitive landscape — particularly since lotteries do not compete with each other in the US. She discusses her various roles in the gaming industry and her transition from customer-facing roles to working with IGT’s internal game studios. Ashlee also shares how Udemy got ahead of the curve in offering upskilling opportunities to learners by offering online certifications and credentials.
As a bit of context, Kentucky Lottery plays a pivotal role in our state’s economy. We also provide education assistance to scholars around the state. We’re a billion-dollar business corporation, but we’re also quasi-governmental, which means we’re lean, effective, and have the highest level of integrity in how we operate.
Our mission is to fuel imagination and fund education for all Kentuckians. In fact, the KLC has returned over $5 billion dollars to Kentucky students through educational scholarships and grants, which is something we’re extremely proud of. With that, we’re constantly looking for new ways to delight and entertain our players while ensuring that we’re contributing as much as we can back to the state to fund programs for our young people.
It’s fun and unique — more than anywhere else I’ve ever worked. Prior to last fall, the product team had always sat within the marketing department, and that team has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. They decided to break those two teams apart, so I was brought on to serve that newly-dedicated product org. I’m super lucky to have many seasoned and talented people on my team.
My job is to keep them unblocked and let them do what they do best while fostering continuous learning and innovation. Right now, we’re very focused on just aligning our product goals with overall business objectives and defining our roles as they relate to the marketing side of things.
That was definitely what I was most concerned about when I first came in. I don’t think that this is something that’s perfectly solvable right now. It’s an ongoing process. We have a lot of amazing, long-tenured employees, and I have no doubt that amazing things are ahead. I started by going on a listening tour and understanding everybody’s roles, responsibilities, and the marketing org. I talked to various stakeholders around the business about how they’re working with the marketing and product teams. We hosted this series of workshops to uncover any friction points, our hopes, and our fears for the future.
We have some great structure in place and processes. We’re developing RACI matrices all over the place so that we understand and are clearly defining responsibilities. We’re making sure that we’re actively maintaining open, transparent communication, but also not stepping on toes. It’s not going to happen overnight, but everybody’s approaching this in a very open way and is open to change.
They legalized sports betting in Kentucky back in September, the same month that I joined. As expected when it goes live in a new area, the ads were everywhere you looked. Yes, now we’re competing for that same entertainment dollar. It’s a real opportunity for us because lotteries aren’t competitive with each other in the US. Many of them have operated with little to no direct competition.
We have these new competitors in the mix, and I am choosing to see it as an opportunity for us to take a look at the value that we’re providing our players and ensure we’re staying competitive. We don’t want to lose market share and want to make sure that we’re providing the best possible experiences for our players and meeting them where they’re at. There is a huge likelihood of crossover between sports betting folks and lottery folks, so it’s important for us to think about.
What can we learn from new competition to bring better products to market? We work closely with our partners in marketing and have an evergreen promotion of a first deposit match on our iLottery platform. I don’t think we would’ve done that if we hadn’t started feeling the effects of increased competition in the state. Like I said, it’s an opportunity for us, and we’re doing really well.
I joined IGT back in 2015 right after their merger with Gtech. I was initially hired to work with the Kentucky Lottery as they were preparing to launch their iLottery product. Until then, they had only been retail-based, and I was hired to launch that, develop their product roadmap, and provide marketing support. We got it out the door, supported that for a while, and built out their product catalog of instant online games.
As part of my role at IGT, I headed out to Lotto New Zealand for over a year to help them launch instant play games. They already had an iLottery platform, but it was a heavy lift to deliver that and make sure that we had the right product mix. We developed several bespoke games for them. When I returned, the IGT team relocated me out to San Francisco where I started working with our game studios. This was a much different role from what I had been doing previously because it was internal instead of customer-facing. It was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences in my career.
I was tasked with building a cross-functional team to develop a brand-new game development framework. We had five different game studios around the world, and there were approximately five different game development frameworks. They all had to support the same game, so it wasn’t working out.
The business wanted to eventually develop a game development kit, onboard third-party studios, and bring everyone together to develop new igaming and iLottery games on IGT’s remote gaming server (RGS) quickly and efficiently. The team consisted of game developers, backend and frontend engineers, artists, sound designers, etc. We eventually rolled out a third-party program with a supporting GDK and that was exciting and challenging.
We had to find ways of working from different time zones using tools that we had available to us. During COVID, everybody was comfortable relying on Zoom all the time and working odd hours, but this was when everyone was still in the studio. We might have one hour of crossover time with Belgrade at the beginning of the day and with China at the end of the day. Trying to build a cohesive team that was distributed with all the various studio cultures was difficult. They’d all built their own frameworks that they were very connected to, but I was very proud of how they overcame the challenges and cultural differences to create something they could all get behind.
In the different markets, we had to understand differences in culture, regulations, and user needs. Building out a product roadmap in New Zealand was very different from Kentucky because New Zealand is highly sensitive to player health. In Kentucky, when we first launched, we had deposit limits of $250 a week, whereas in New Zealand, the spending limit is $50 a week. And if you think about an Instant Play game that has a lot of churn or a higher payout, that money can disappear very quickly.
We had to develop a roadmap that included games that extended playtime and provided a lot of entertainment value but didn’t encourage players to blow through their small allowance. We had to be very cautious about cultural sensitivities. Further, as a Crown entity, Lotto New Zealand is open to government scrutiny. We had to avoid anything that could be perceived as childish or unintentionally appeal to a younger audience. That’s why we developed bespoke games just for them — they got to direct the art and the mechanics to better suit their player needs.
In Kentucky, we found over time that we’re constantly looking at user data. We’re looking at lotteries of interest and comparing user data. One of the beautiful things about the lottery industry is that we don’t compete with each other. We’re very open with other state and international lotteries about what we’re learning and taking away from our initiatives.
There are regulations, but a lot of it is up to the lottery to make decisions in good faith and keep responsible gaming top of mind. We have a responsible gaming committee, and I sit on that within the lottery. We also have oversight from the board of directors, from various backgrounds, and the state government.
I feel very good about having come from gaming. We’re constantly looking through the lens of player health, and we want to balance that with providing an excellent, entertaining, delightful experience. It is always a balancing act, but player health does have to remain number one for us.
At Udemy, the technical program management (TPM) team is really unique in that it sits within the product design and engineering (PDE) org. All the TPMs have to work cross-functionally across all of the business, including B2C and B2B. I had the opportunity to work with lots of fun and innovative programs. We developed the very first partnership platform and worked with a bank in South Africa to offer free courses to their loyalty members.
This gave me the great opportunity to work directly with an outside customer. I got to drive the badging and credentialing initiative. It’s all about upskilling now and taking additional courses and certifications, and we were on the front wave of that.
I also got to drive Udemy’s response to the war in Ukraine because up to that point, we had instructors and students in Russia. We decided that we were not going to profit from Russia anymore and had to find a way to communicate that with our instructors and learners. At the same time, we figured out a way to provide free learning to all Ukrainian higher-ed students. We worked directly with their cabinet of education to open that up, and it was really tough with everything they were going through, but an awesome initiative.
It’s really interesting thinking back on how all of that transpired. We were ahead of LinkedIn on that, and it was a combination of listening to our learners who were interested in telling us that they wanted to earn actual digital badges. They didn’t really care about a Udemy certificate, they wanted something to show their boss that actually proves they have taken initiative to upskill and is digitally portable outside of our platform.
We saw trends on other credentialing sites that allowed users to take their credentials with them and listened to our instructors who said they wanted to be certified to work with AWS and Google.
Through looking at the data of how many learners were actually downloading and sharing their certificates, as well as through word of mouth, we had a lot of information to go off of. We took a very measured, agile approach of inspecting, adapting, and rolling it out to a small set of users at a time. We’d take a step back, talk to them, and then iterate.
I’m super excited about AI. That was one of the last forays that we were diving into before I left Udemy. The sky’s the limit. I see it as an opportunity — I’m not afraid of it. I’m really excited about the ethical application of AI in almost everything we do. Within my business and our corporation, I’m working with an AI committee. We’re developing policy around it, which I think is important. We need some guardrails around things that are that powerful and could create an exposure that nobody wants.
From everything that we do from product lifecycle player personalization, there’s so much opportunity. Even just streamlining processes, increasing our team productivity, QA, development, etc. This is something I’m actively championing at the KLC, and I’m really passionate about applying it in all the ways that we work with our players and our retailers as well.
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