<aside> 👋 This section details the entire project lifecycle including how to engage in user research, and what to do when the project has been delivered.

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The project lifecycle

Step 1: Product Research

This research step has 4 sub-steps that occur prior to starting your first sprint. This stage includes the following

1. Project sourcing
2. Understand the problem you are solving
3. Research on existing solutions
4. Evaluate existing solutions

At the end of this produce research phase, you should have a product requirements document (PRD) developed to support the development of the project. The product features that you outline in this PRD should be categorized into three types of features.

• Minimum Viable Product: The minimum features that need to be developed to solve the proposed problem
• Desirable Feature: The features that are nice to have which would enhance user experience using the product
• Stretch Goals: The features that could be out-of-scope or be beyond the allocated project timeline.

Step 2: User Research

This stage must be done early in your project cycle, preferably during your first sprint. Some steps that you should include in your user research process should include the following

• Conduct user & nonprofit partner interviews
• Understand users’ pain-points
• Actively consider and include all users
• Induce feature priority

<aside> ❓ Questions you could include in your user interviews

• Get to know their work in the organization
• Ask them to demonstrate how they complete the specific task central to the problem statement (ask for a demonstration on how they navigate through their existing framework if applicable)
• Gauge and ask what the hardest part of the task is
• Ask how we can make doing the task easier
• Show them any example product with similar product specifications to gauge what they like and dislike about the product. </aside>