Over this sprint, our team made significant progress transitioning from feature development to getting feedback and validation. Deployment on November 14 allowed us to begin testing with Meaningful, I2U, and several one-off users. Getting real users to interact with our platform helped us refine SmartMail, strengthen the meeting workflow, and resolve pre-launch technical issues. First we tested within our Inspire teams and moved towards other non-profits and one-off users.
We also faced notable challenges like limited staging capacity, difficulty coordinating with nonprofits with tight schedules, and moments of misalignment between Inspire and Meaningful.This some instability in our team’s confidence to progress in the feedback stage. We overcame these obstacles by reserving a dedicated testing environment, organizing structured tester scheduling, and establishing earlier, clearer communication with our partner. Through this we have learned about the obstacles in beginning the validation phase, and are proud that we were able to move past them to start taking more opportunities to get more users interacting with the system.
This sprint pushed us to understand and empathize with our users more deeply. Many of us realized how differently nonprofits work compared to our assumptions, especially how limited time, staff, and digital systems shape their workflows. Personally, several team members found it surprising that we needed to simplify features we thought were intuitive, we discovered that real users needed even clearer flows. This shifted our thinking toward designing for actual behaviour rather than imagined behaviour.
Despite illnesses, travel, and availability, our team dynamic remained supportive and adaptable. Looking ahead, we anticipate tighter timelines as we move toward final polishing, gathering validation, and conference preparation, but we also feel more confident in our process particularly in adapting quickly, aligning expectations early, and grounding decisions in user feedback. We are looking forward to showcasing our product in the final conference designed for the nonprofit community and beyond.