Concept Map Template
Generate new ideas and structure your thoughts with Miro’s concept map template. Explore connections between concepts and let your creativity flow.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the Concept Map Template
Miro’s concept map template is a free visual tool you can use to break down complex ideas into sub-topics — allowing you to present your ideas in a visually compelling and digestible way.
With color-coded sticky notes, arrows connecting your ideas, and text boxes to add any important labels, the concept map template saves you a ton of time from having to build a diagram from scratch.
Plus — with access to Miro’s visual workspace, you can easily share your concept map, run presentations, and customize the template to your liking. In other words, you get to focus on the part that matters: breaking down ideas and sharing them.
We’ll walk you through how to make the most of the concept map template and how it’ll benefit your team.
How to use the concept map template
To get started, click on the blue “Use template” button on this page to open the concept map template in Miro. Once you’re in, invite anyone you’d like to collaborate on the template with by clicking the blue “Share” button on the top right of your board and granting your teammates access.
All set? Follow the steps below to fill in the concept map template:
1. Choose a central topic
Think of a topic you’d like to break down and understand better, then add it to the large orange sticky note on the concept map template. This is your concept map’s starting point — also known as the central topic, focus question, or key concept.
2. Break the central topic down
See the large pink and blue sticky notes connected to the central topic? That’s where you’ll enter the first few sub-topics you can think of. Let’s say your central topic is “planning a vacation.” Your first sub-topics might be the different areas of a vacation you’d need to plan. You could write “destinations” on one sticky note, “accommodation” on another, and “transportation” on another.
Need more sticky notes? Right-click on any of them on your board and choose “Duplicate” — or press N on your keyboard to add more.
3. Add more sub-topics
Keep breaking your ideas down by filling in the next set of sticky notes on the concept map template. Going back to our vacation planning example, there are several possible sub-topics you could come up with for the ones we identified in Step 2.
For example, under “destinations,” you could write down different cities you’d want to visit on your trip — one on each sticky note. Under “transportation,” you could write different modes of transportation you’d want to take to get around.
4. Connect all your ideas
As you add more ideas to your concept map, be sure to connect them to their preceding ideas — clearly visualizing the relationships between them. The concept map template already comes with pre-made arrows for you to use, but you can easily add more using our automated diagramming features.
Click on any of the sticky notes on the template to reveal blue dots along its edges. Then click on any of those blue dots to generate an arrow from that point. These arrows will also automatically generate a new sticky note on the other end — saving you time from having to create new ones yourself. And if there’s already a sticky note near one of the blue dots you click on, the arrow will automatically connect to it.
To rearrange an arrow’s direction or adjust its curve, click on an arrow to reveal bullet points and drag them as needed.
5. Share your concept map
Whether you’d like feedback on your concept map or want to present your ideas, it’s easy to share your template. Invite people to view and comment on your Miro board and tag them in important discussions right on your concept map template. You can also export your template as an image or PDF, generate a shareable URL, or embed it on other sites.
When to use the concept map template
From helping someone learn a new idea to plotting out customer journeys, concept maps are useful in all kinds of situations. Here are a few scenarios where Miro’s concept map template will come in handy:
Mapping user flows and customer journeys
Businesses commonly use concept maps to walk through a product’s user flow or customer journey. With a clear visual breakdown, you’ll be able to think about a product from different angles, including how your customers see it. This makes it easier to identify any challenges your users might be facing and think about ways to improve their experience.
Running brainstorming sessions
Concept maps are excellent brainstorming tools — whether you’re planning a creative project or coming up with quarterly goals at work. By continuously breaking an idea down, you can use your concept map to explore all kinds of paths you could take, decisions you could make, or even different outcomes you might encounter — depending on what topic you’re brainstorming for.
Training and education
Creating training and education materials is probably one of the most common reasons to use a concept map, especially if you’re teaching or learning about a complex subject. Breaking things down visually provides a nice alternative to text-heavy learning materials, making complex subjects more accessible — especially if you’re a visual learner.
Benefits of using Miro’s concept map template
When you open Miro’s free concept map template, you also get access to our visual workspace — allowing you to customize the diagram to your liking, easily share your content, and even present your work.
Change up the colors of your sticky notes, connection lines, text, and even your board’s background. Adjust the thickness and style of your lines, make sticky notes bigger or smaller, and change the size of your text. You can also swap out the sticky notes for cards to add more detail and give your ideas some context. In other words, you get to make the concept map template your own.
You already know multiple ways to share the concept map template, but did you know you can run presentations straight from your Miro board? Use Presentation Mode to host live sessions with interactive features to keep your audience engaged.
But if you’re not up for another meeting, use TalkTrack to record immersive audio and video walkthroughs to share with your team async — allowing everyone to dive into your concept map in their own time.
What is a concept map for?
Concept maps are excellent tools for quickly breaking down complex ideas and presenting them in visually compelling and digestible ways. You can use a concept map for anything from studying to project planning. It’s all about simplifying ideas, making them easier to understand, and adding structure to them. Miro’s concept map template makes this process even easier by providing you with a ready-to-use diagram you can easily fill in, customize, and share with your team.
How do you create a concept map?
Creating a concept map starts with identifying a main topic or idea you’d like to break down and placing it in the center of your diagram. Then, identify the first few sub-topics and draw lines to connect them to the main idea. From there, it’s all about continuing to break your ideas down, and continuing to visualize their relationships. Remember, the goal is clarity — so keep your concept map organized and easy to read. With Miro’s concept map template, we’ve taken care of the diagramming part for you. All you have to do is add your ideas, expand on them as much as you want, and customize everything to your liking.
Get started with this template right now.
SDLC Template
Works best for:
Diagramming
The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) template is a well-designed visual tool that helps software development teams follow a structured approach from the initial concept to the final deployment of the software. One of the most significant benefits of using this template is that it promotes clear, streamlined communication among team members. By breaking the development cycle into distinct phases, all stakeholders can stay informed about the progress of the project and understand their responsibilities within the larger context. This enhanced communication reduces the chances of misunderstandings and ensures that everyone works together towards the common goal of delivering high-quality software. The template acts not only as a roadmap but also as a shared language for the team, improving collaboration and the efficient progression of the project through each critical stage.
Kaizen Report Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Operations, Documentation
What makes a great company great? They know that greatness needs to be fostered and maintained — meaning they never stop working to improve. If you’re one of those companies (or aspire to be), a kaizen report is an ideal tool. It creates a simple visual guide to continuous improvement activities on a team, departmental, and organizational level. Using a kaizen report approach, every employee in an organization audits their own processes and understands what they might have overlooked, making this a powerful tool for increasing accountability at all levels.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Strategic Planning, Project Planning
Clarity, focus, and structure — those are the key ingredients to feeling confident in your company’s directions and decisions, and an OKR framework is designed to give them to you. Working on two main levels — strategic and operational — OKRs (short for objectives and key results) help an organization’s leaders determine the strategic objectives and define quarterly key results, which are then connected to initiatives. That’s how OKRs empower teams to focus on solving the most pressing organizational problems they face.
SMART Goals Template
Works best for:
Prioritization, Strategic Planning, Project Management
Setting goals can be encouraging, but can also be overwhelming. It can be hard to conceptualize every step you need to take to achieve a goal, which makes it easy to set goals that are too broad or too much of a stretch. SMART is a framework that allows you to establish goals in a way that sets you up for success. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. If you keep these attributes in mind whenever you set goals, then you’ll ensure your objectives are clear and reachable. Your team can use the SMART model anytime you want to set goals. You can also use SMART whenever you want to reevaluate and refine those goals.
Job Map Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Mapping
Want to truly understand your consumers’ mindset? Take a look at things from their perspective — by identifying the “jobs” they need to accomplish and exploring what would make them “hire” or “fire” a product or service like yours. Ideal for UX researchers, job mapping is a staged process that gives you that POV by breaking the “jobs” down step by step, so you can ultimately offer something unique, useful, and different from your competitors. This template makes it easy to create a detailed, comprehensive job map.
Empathy Map Template
Works best for:
Market Research, User Experience, Mapping
Attracting new users, compelling them to try your product, and turning them into loyal customers—it all starts with understanding them. An empathy map is a tool that leads to that understanding, by giving you space to articulate everything you know about your customers, including their needs, expectations, and decision-making drivers. That way you’ll be able to challenge your assumptions and identify the gaps in your knowledge. Our template lets you easily create an empathy map divided into four key squares—what your customers Say, Think, Do, and Feel.