Keep Nonprofit Platform User-Centered

Company Context

CareBridge is a mid-sized nonprofit technology organization that provides a coordination platform for food delivery, volunteer scheduling, and partner agency referrals. The platform serves three core groups: volunteers, partner agencies, and families receiving services across 40 cities.

Problem

CareBridge has grown quickly over the past 18 months, but product teams are increasingly driven by internal requests from operations, fundraising, and engineering rather than direct user needs. Recent signals show friction across the ecosystem: volunteer shift completion has fallen from 78% to 71%, partner agencies report duplicate intake work in 22% of cases, and family satisfaction dropped from 4.5 to 4.1 out of 5. Leadership wants to ensure future technology investments stay centered on end users instead of becoming internally optimized but externally frustrating.

You are the PM responsible for defining how CareBridge should keep product development grounded in real user needs while still shipping quickly. Assume the company has limited research capacity and must choose where to focus first.

Deliverables

1. Define which user segment you would prioritize first and explain why.
2. Describe how you would uncover and validate the most important user needs across volunteers, agencies, and families.
3. Propose a product approach or operating model that keeps roadmap decisions user-centered over time.
4. Recommend the first 2-3 product improvements or process changes you would prioritize.
5. Define how you would measure whether the platform is becoming more user-centered.

Constraints

• MVP improvements must be scoped for a 12-week quarter.
• Product team has 1 designer, 4 engineers, and access to only 20 user interviews this quarter.
• Families include low-digital-literacy and multilingual users, so solutions cannot assume high app fluency.
• Partner agencies use legacy systems, so deep integrations are unlikely in the first release.
• Leadership expects visible operational impact, not just research outputs.