Phase 1: Understand

The exercises in this phase help us understand and empathize with the users' life (consumer software) or work (business software) needs.

Throughout the phase, people take notes, often on sticky notes that they stick to the walls of the room.

We start with "pitch practice", where the client pitches their product like they would to investors. This helps us identify the user, their problem, and the job they are hiring the product to do. It also begins documenting the vocabulary used in the domain (opens new window).

We then review research from Quora, Analytics, AdWords Keyword Planner, interviews, and surveys. This helps us understand users' motivation, the marketing funnel, and the size of target markets.

Lastly, we sketch what the rest of the sprint will focus on: the critical path for the software. At this point, we try to keep this high-level and as light on implementation details as possible. A great question to help generate the critical path is:

What job is the user hiring the product to do?

We will edit the critical path as we move through the phases.