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Planner- Product Requirements Document

Planner- Product Requirements Document

Owned by Ragini Tiwari (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Jul 05, 2023
4 min read

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.

Table of Contents:

Problem

Questions to answer:

  • What problem are we solving? (Pain points)

    • Creating a planner for an entire course with every semester details separately

    • Easy to track the course completed and to plan for upcoming semester.

    • Can create your own custom plan or use the template provided by the system.

  • For whom? (Customers)

    •   For incoming & existing students of UTD

  • When do they experience this issue?

    • At the beginning of each semester, before enrolling in the course.

  • What data, research, and feedback do we have that explains this problem? (User Surveys, Customer Interviews)

    • We have 145

    • users testing data based on the survey conducted in March’23.

  • Which customers are we working with, or hearing from, to better understand this problem? (User Testing, Focus Groups)

    • Currently focusing on undergrad student.

    • Most probably will extend our product to graduate as well PHD students.

  • Why is solving this problem urgent? Why is it important?

    • There is no single platform that offers all the primary information required for course selection or plan all the semester in a single place.

    • Need something which saves students’ time as they waste it by switching between apps, contacting previous students, and taking demo classes.

Proposal

Questions to answer:

  • How are we solving this issue?

    • Creating an intuitive website that provides the list of courses based on the degree plan, eventually saves students time and helps them in making decisions about the right plan for their semester.

  • What alternatives did we consider?

    • Students can go to galaxy portal and check for the schedule planner for the availability of professors and the courses.

    • Contacting Academic Advisor

    • Contacting other students.

    • Research according to own’s interest

  • Why did we land with this?

    • To provide a readily accessible, easy to use and intuitive platform that provide detail about all the degree plans with its courses ready to drag and drop the classes for the semester, export the plan and get ready for the semester

  • What is the general shape of this solution?

    • It will be an easily accessible and user-friendly website with reliable data about the degree plan with credit hours and courses needed to complete the degree based on relevant plan

  • Do you have any mocks, prototypes, or relevant comparisons in the market?

    • Yes, Galaxy/coursebook

  • How will we know that we’ve solved this issue?

    • If students can make enrollment decisions fast, approximately within 2 hrs (currently, from the user testing data – they take a 1 hr to a maximum of more than 6 hrs).

    • Students only use Nebula Planner and Coursebook to make enrollment decisions.

  • What will we measure?

    • Reduction in time required to plan the degree as well as the semester.

    • Improvement in Academic performances for students who took enrollment decisions using Nebula planner. ??????

  • Have we considered how we’re building this to be fast, performant, scalable, and/or relatively low-cost on our services?

    • We are using reliable course data from UTD.

    • We will use a reliable cloud server to host our website and a secure database to store the information.

    • We will use the flexible web stack for the development of the website and hence make it vertically scalable.

    • We will be using a monitoring tool (potentially an inbuilt tool from AWS/Heroku or any cloud provider) to monitor the average load on the website and its scalability.

    • In the future, we will use a load balancer to make it more fault tolerant.

    • We will try to use analytics tool to monitor the page search and amount of time used on different search and buttons.

Plan

Questions to answer:

  • What are we building?

    • A readily accessible, user-friendly, and intuitive website which can help plan the semester as well as entire course with ease.

  • How does it work?

    • While interacting with user-friendly UI, when the user clicks on the template (new/custom), it will navigate to a new page and then we can use drag and drop functionality to plan the classes required for current semester as well as the upcoming ones.

  • How do we know that it works?

    • When we see the accurate results as well as the number of students opting for Nebula planner suing analytics tool.

  • What are we measuring?

    • Time taken to plan a degree/semester.

    • Accuracy of results.

    • User engagement time.

  • When will it be ready?

    • The product is already launched.

❌What are we not building? (Out of Scope)

  • Not recommending courses to students based on their major.???????

  • Not suggesting any alternative courses if a course is full.????????

 

Then, answer these questions:

  • Question 1: Does everyone know what we are launching?

    • No, we have to strategize promotion our products to stduents.

  • Question 2: Are we sure this is going to work?

    • Yes. We have seen a lot of demand for such a product through user survey stats.

  • Question 3: What are our launch steps?

    • Ideate and design features - done

    • Inittial Development - done

    • Testing - done

    • Going Live (with new/initial features)

    • Marketing - still needed

    • Maintaining and Improving (again step1 and so on repeat)