"Product brief: Family Shapes"

1) Problem

Who is the user?

• Families, donor-conceived people, donors, and supporting organizations (clinics and cryobanks).

What pain are we solving?

• Relationship, identity, and collaboration information is fragmented across tools and organizations, making it difficult to build trusted family context while preserving privacy boundaries.

2) Why now

• The platform has active workstreams around permissions, sharing controls, and multi-surface storytelling that need a shared, lightweight product anchor.

3) Solution (MVP)

One-sentence pitch: Family Shapes helps people map, understand, and safely collaborate around modern family relationships across recipient, donor, clinic, and community contexts.

MVP scope (in)

• Family tree and relationship graph experiences with role-aware collaboration.
• Sharing, invitation, and permissions workflows backed by auditable policies.

Out of scope (v1)

• Full native mobile parity.
• Advanced paid-enterprise feature packaging.

4) Success metrics

• Activation: New users create or join a tree and complete an initial relationship graph.
• Retention: Returning weekly activity across family graph updates and collaboration actions.
• Revenue (if applicable): Early organization/partner conversion for SaaS-aligned workflows.

5) Assumptions and risks

Assumption	Risk if false	Validation plan
Users will adopt role-based collaboration controls	Sharing workflows remain confusing and underused	Track invitation acceptance, permission changes, and user feedback loops

6) Open questions

• What is the optimal boundary between family/community collaboration and organization-admin workflows?
• Which privacy defaults best balance safety, trust, and discoverability for different user roles?

Provenance

• Source file: ../product/product-brief.md
• Source URL: https://github.com/maggielerman/family-shapes/blob/main/DOCS/product/product-brief.md