User centric roadmap setup

Prioritise ideas and requirements

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Understand ‘Why’

To truly understand the challenges students face each semester, I asked current Monash students to break down a semester into key stages and list the typical activities at each stage. I then asked them to explain how they personally complete each activity.

For example, when it comes to tracking assessment due dates, some students with fewer assessments found that adding deadlines to their Google or Apple calendar worked well. On the other hand, students managing a larger number of assessments found this setup tedious and preferred simply printing out a list of due dates.

Hearing about these workarounds gave me valuable insight into just how unsatisfied students are with the current process and highlighted what the system at Monash is missing.

Impactfulness score

The results of the workshops highlighted where the key pain points were and how desirable potential solutions would be. This provided the team with a valuable starting list of features. To define the MVP for the app launch, we needed to further refine this list by assessing both feasibility and impact, allowing the team to prioritise effectively.

For the feasibility check, the mobile development team and I reviewed each item to determine how ready the necessary data was to support the feature. Unfortunately, some highly desired features—like the assessment weight breakdown—were unlikely to be available in the near future. These features required significant changes to the workflow on the teaching staff’s side to first clean and structure the data. We decided to set aside these long-shot features as future action items to address with the relevant stakeholders.

When it came to estimating impact, we aligned on two key criteria: how broadly each feature would affect the user base and how frequently each feature would likely be used.

Timetable: The best impact with the least effort

The analysis quickly revealed a clear opportunity for the mobile app: to become a one-stop hub for managing daily schedules. This emerged as the most consistently frustrating task that coursework students faced several times a week.