Tip: This template is intended to help teams plan, design and develop products with the greatest chance for success. It helps teams think through their work more deeply, improves asynchronous communication with other teams, and creates space for collaboration.
👀 Problem
Questions to answer:
What problem are we solving? (Pain points)
o   Difficulty in choosing courses and professors.
o   Classes are always full. No way to know if a new class was added.
o   Difficult to get Prof. reviews in one place.
o   Difficult to get course reviews in one place.
o   Easy way to obtain previous students’ opinions.
For whom? (Customers)
o   For incoming & existing students of UTD
When do they experience this issue?
o   During their course plan or at the semester beginning.
What data, research, and feedback do we have that explains this problem? (User Surveys, Customer Interviews)
o   We have collected user surveys
o   We have product’s beta version ready
o   We have user testing data.
Which customers are we working with, or hearing from, to better understand this problem? (User Testing, Focus Groups)
o   We are working with all types of students at UTD. So far we collected about 20 user testing data.
Why is solving this problem urgent? Why is it important?
o   This helps reduce the time spent by students going through multiple websites like UTD Trends and Rate My Prof.
💠Proposal
Questions to answer:
How are we solving this issue?
o   We plan to offer students the ability to view previous data about courses & professors in an organized manner and let them rate & review.
What alternatives did we consider?
o   Alternative would be asking each professor individually, taking trial classes of those professors or creating an excel database
o   Contacting Academic Advisor
Why did we land with this?
o   It is much more accessible, scalable & intuitive.
What is the general shape of this solution?
o   The solution is designed to be user-friendly, with a simple and intuitive interface that makes it easy for students to search and find the information they need.
o   It contains reliable data to make decisions about the course or prof. selection.
Do you have any mocks, prototypes, or relevant comparisons in the market?
o   We currently have a prototype. For comparison, there are UTD Grades and Rate My Prof.
How will we know that we’ve solved this issue?
o   We will know when the course plan time has been reduced, and students’ academic performance has improved.
What will we measure?
o   We will use data from user feedback, reviews, and ratings and ask specific questions regarding the satisfaction level and time taken.
Have we considered how we’re building this to be fast, performant, scalable, and/or relatively low-cost on our services?
o   The Product & Services will be offered free of cost.
o   We will be doing testing to identify issues & make the product fast & performant.
o   The Product will be made scalable as it will use API based calls and the APIs will be documented.
🛫 Plan
Questions to answer:
What are we building?
o   We are building a website that solves the mentioned issue for students.
How does it work?
o   It uses databases stored in the server, an intuitive front-end UI that provides the search interface and related data for comparison.
How do we know that it works?
o   We know that it works if a user is seamlessly able to decide on which courses to enrol.
What are we measuring?
o   We are measuring the user’s engagement with the website and what are the elements user is interacting with.
When will it be ready?
o   We will start in August 2023. It will be ready by December 2023.
Then, answer these questions:
Question 1: Does everyone know what we are launching?
o   Few of the customers know that will be a better version of rate my professor/UTD Grades
Question 2: Are we sure this is going to work?
o   Yes. We have seen a lot of demand for such a product through user survey stats
Question 3: What are our launch steps?
o   Launch 1: Design overhaul with all basic features.
o   Launch 2: Possibilities of integration with Planner.
🚀 It’s go time!
… and feel free to link to other more detailed documents