Planning templates
Simplify your workflows and optimize your daily routines with our collection of planning templates.
Annual Calendar (2021)
Plenty of calendars help you focus on the day-to-day deadlines. With this one, it’s all about the big picture. Borrowing from the grid structure of 12-month wall calendars, this template shows you your projects, commitments, and goals one full year at a time. So you and your team can prepare to hunker down during busy periods, move things around as needed, and celebrate your progress. And getting started is so easy—just name your calendar’s color-coded streams and drag stickies onto the start date.
Action Plan
Why create an action plan? Long-term business strategies and goals are only good if you can make them a reality—by accomplishing every small task along the way. An action plan lists those tasks and lays them out in clear detail. It helps you keep everything in order, make sure nothing is missed, and get stakeholders on the same page to complete a project quickly and effectively. This template will help you write an action plan that’s SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
Job Map
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.
What's on Your Radar
Do you or your team feel overburdened by tasks? Having trouble focusing on particular problems? What’s on Your Radar is a thought exercise in which you plot ideas according to their importance or relevance. Designers and teams use what’s on your radar to ensure that their ideas are within the scope of a given project. They also rely on the method to assess whether a given solution is likely to solve the problem at hand. But even if you’re not a designer, the method can help assign priorities and ground your ideas in reality.
Opportunity Canvas
Features and capabilities — they make or break a product, which is why companies spend so much time and effort focusing on them. Sound like you? Try it with an Opportunity Canvas. This streamlined one-pager gives you and your team the power to improve your product by exploring the use cases, potential setbacks, strategies, challenges, and metrics. An Opportunity Canvas is ideal if you’ve already built a product, because you don’t need to consider the operational or revenue model.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
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.
Eisenhower Matrix
Have an overwhelming list of to-dos? Prioritize them based on two key factors: urgency and importance. It worked for American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, and it can work for you—this decision-making framework will help you know where to start and how to plan your day. With our template, you can easily build an Eisenhower Matrix with a quadrant of key areas (Do, Schedule, Delegate, and Don’t Do) and revisit it throughout the day as your priorities change.
Concept Map
Put simply, a concept map creates “ah, I get it now” moments for how complex ideas or concepts — specifically how they relate to each other. It’s a super simple visual tool. Typically, concepts are written in boxes or circles, and then label arrows are used to connect them with related ideas or information in a downward-branching hierarchical structure. Whether you’re learning (and teaching your team) a new subject or mapping out a user flow, this template will help you make progress and have breakthroughs.
Lesson Plan
Use the Lesson Plan to inform everyone about assignments, get clarity when planning lessons, and align your student’s expectations. Many educators use the Lesson Plan template to organize their teaching material and assess learning experiences and insights into students’ progress and interests. The Lesson Plan is an excellent tool for giving students an overview of the learning plan and connecting deeper with the topics and the study sessions.
Quick Retrospective
A retrospective template empowers you to run insightful meetings, take stock of your work, and iterate effectively. The term “retrospective” has gained popularity over the more common “debriefing” and “post-mortem,” since it’s more value-neutral than the other terms. Some teams refer to these meetings as “sprint retrospectives” or “iteration retrospectives,” “agile retrospectives” or “iteration retrospectives.” Whether you are a scrum team, using the agile methodology, or doing a specific type of retrospective (e.g. a mad, sad, glad retrospective), the goals are generally the same: discovering what went well, identifying the root cause of problems you had, and finding ways to do better in the next iteration.
Retrospective 4Ls
So you just completed a sprint. Teams busted their humps and emotions ran high. Now take a clear-eyed look back and grade the sprint honestly—what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved. This approach (4Ls stand for liked, learned, lacked, and longed for) is an invaluable way to remove the emotion and look at the process critically. That’s how you can build trust, improve morale, and increase engagement—as well as make adjustments to be more productive and successful in the future.
Timeline
A timeline displays a chronological order of important dates, and scheduled events. Timelines help product managers, project managers, and team members tell visual stories about progress and obstacles. Timelines enable teams to see at a glance what happened before, what progress is happening now, and what needs tackling in the future. Projects or products with specific purpose or deliverables should be based on a timeline to be successful. Use the timeline as a shared reference for start dates, end dates, and milestones.
Social Media Calendar
Most businesses have a social media presence, but many of them aren’t using social media as a competitive differentiator. The Social Media Calendar template allows you to plan, schedule, and craft posts for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, so you can leverage social media as a strategic tool to promote your brand. Use the Social Media Calendar template to plan out your social content a week, month, or quarter in advance. Collaborate with the marketing team, prepare for product launches and major initiatives, and share draft social posts.
Communications Plan
You saw the opportunity. You developed the product. Now comes an important step: Find your audience and speak to them in a way that’s clear, memorable, and inspiring. You need a communications plan—a strategy for controlling your narrative at every stage of your business—and this template will help you create a good one. No need to build a new strategy every time you have something to communicate. Here, you can simplify the process, streamline your messaging, and empower you to communicate in ways that grow with your business.
Project Proposal
For any type of project, the Project Proposal template can be a crucial step toward clarifying the context, goals, and scope of a project to get stakeholder buy-in. A project proposal outlines what you want to accomplish, your goals, and how you plan to achieve them. Generally, a project proposal gives the reader some context on the project, explains why it is important, and lists the actions that you will take to complete it. Project proposals have myriad uses. Often, businesses use project proposals to get external buy-in from a donor or outside stakeholder. But many companies draw up project proposals for internal buy-in too.
Milestone Chart
When your team is collaborating on a large project, keeping track of the many tasks and multiple timelines can be a challenge. That’s why you need a milestone chart. These visual representations of important project events will make it simple for your team to stay on schedule and reach goals on time. And it’s so easy to get started — just determine the major milestones, use our template to create a milestone chart, and define the key dates and deliverables each milestone will require.
Event Planning
Whether you’re planning a product launch, fully remote conference, or milestone event, the Event Planning Template will act as a visual checklist and map for all the details you need to consider before the big day. The Event Planning Template is an adaptable way to make sure the creative and strategic vision of your event doesn’t get lost in the details. By mapping out different sections - from the marketing plan, to the agenda, to snacks and swag for guests — you and your team can focus on the details most important to your functions, and collaborate as needed when overlaps occur.
Working Backwards
Amazon pioneered the working backwards approach based on one of their key principles: celebrating customer obsession. Working backwards is a framework for thinking about a product without a detailed roadmap. Your product team would work back from a mental image of the customer to launch your product in a way that truly serves them. The method requires anyone with a new product or feature idea to articulate its objective as clearly as possible.. If the idea presentation impresses leadership, the next step is to map out what the team needs in order to get to the product or feature launch.
Weekly Planner
In our hectic world, it can be hard to plan out a schedule and stick to it. Whether you’re rigorous about scheduling or you struggle to keep your calendar updated, you’ll benefit from a weekly planner. A weekly planner is a schedule of your plans and activities over a week. It enables you to manage your time, track tasks, and organize your team by day. Unlike most paper planners, which are not personalizable, you can change up this weekly planner to create an agenda that fits your needs.
T-Chart
T-Charts can help you compare and contrast two different ideas, group information into different categories, and prove a change through “before” and “after” analysis. T-Charts are visual organizational tools that enable you to compare ideas, so you can evaluate pros and cons, facts and opinions, strengths and weaknesses, or big-picture views versus specific details. Designers and content creators can use T-Charts to turn possibilities into actionable ideas. T-Charts are useful for discussing differences and similarities with your team or clients and can help you to reach a decision together.
Strategic Planning
Whenever you need to define your goals and figure out the steps you’ll need to take to accomplish them, you’ll benefit from a Strategic Planning template. The Strategic Planning template guides you and your team through exercises to help you assess your current situation, determine their goals for the future, and develop a plan to help them get there. Generally, strategy considers the goals or reasons for doing something while planning refers to the specific actions you’ll take in order to achieve a specific goal. But with strategic planning, you’re considering both at the same time.
STAR
STAR is a framework that stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. Use this strategy to answer interview questions with concrete examples to show that you have the skills and experience you need. Many hiring managers or interviewer panels will ask prospective employees competency-based questions such as, “Tell me about a time when you …” or “Share an example of a situation where. …” If you’re an employer, you can use STAR to clarify with your team what skills and personality traits make someone a successful, high-level performer.
Stakeholder Analysis
Managing stakeholders is integral to completing a project on time and meeting expectations, so here’s how to use a stakeholder analysis to help. A stakeholder analysis empowers you to meet expectations and complete projects on time by identifying individuals, groups, and organizations with a vested interest in a program or process. In a typical stakeholder analysis, you’ll prioritize stakeholders based on their influence on a project and seek to understand how best to interface with them throughout the course of the project.
Simple Project Plan
A simple project is a North Star for your team, helping them answer any big questions about the project. The project plan should describe the nature of the plan, why you’re doing it, how you’ll make it happen, how you’ll carry out each step of the process, and how long each step is projected to take. If you’re a project manager or team lead, use this template to start a simple project plan, which can then be adapted to suit internal team projects or external client partner projects.
RAID Log
A RAID log is a project planning tool that focuses on four key areas: risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies. Risks are events that could have an adverse effect if they occur, assumptions are things you assume will happen to contribute to the project’s success (and that will have negative consequences if they don’t occur), issues are risks that have already occurred and had a negative impact on the project, and dependencies are things that must start or finish so your project can progress. RAID logs are often used when beginning a new project, but they’re also useful for promoting alignment and sharing status for projects that are already underway.
Project Status Report
A project status report is a short, timely document that keeps your project stakeholders informed and aligned on what is happening, and why. You can start writing this document on your own, then include your teammates as well to produce a timely and relevant report. A project status report should ideally compare the current state of your project against its projected plan. The report tracks on a high level how you achieve your goals, even if you experience setbacks. It’s also likely to be read by an executive-level audience controlling budgets and governance, which can help you keep the report focused on critical issues.
Project Scope
A project scope helps you plan and confirm your project’s goals, deliverables, features, functions, tasks, costs, and deadlines. A project manager and team should develop a project scope as early as possible, as it will directly influence both the schedule and cost of a project as it progresses. Though project scopes will vary depending on your team and objectives, they generally include goals, requirements, major deliverables, assumptions, and constraints. Aim to include the whole team when you create a project scope to ensure everyone is aligned on responsibilities and deadlines.
Meeting Organizer
When it comes to ideas generated during a meeting, you want quantity AND quality. So why choose? Our meeting organizer template will maximize your meeting’s chances of yielding lots of great ideas. It will give you a simple, efficient way to design any activity (including meetings and daily planning) and make sure remote teammates know just what the meeting aims to accomplish. And you can give your meeting organizer power by connecting Miro to your favorite apps and services: Atlassian’s JIRA, Google Drive, Slack, Trello, DropBox and OneDrive.
Feature Planning
Features are what make a product or service fun, but adding new ones is no walk in the park. It takes many steps—ideating, designing, refining, building, testing, launching, and promoting—and just as many stakeholders. Feature Planning lets you put a smooth, sturdy process in place, so you can add a feature successfully, and spend less time and resources doing it. That makes our Feature Planning Template a smart starting point for anyone looking to add new product features, especially members of product, engineering, marketing, and sales teams.
Gap Analysis
Consider your team’s or organization’s ideal state. Now compare it to your current real-world situation. Want to identify the gaps or obstacles that stand between your present and future? Then you’re ready to run a gap analysis. This easy-to-customize template will let your team align on what obstacles are preventing you from hitting your goals sooner, collaborate on a plan to achieve those goals, and push your organization toward growth and development. You can focus on specific gap analyses — including for skills, candidates, software, processes, vendors, data, and more.
Floor Plan
Maybe you’re planning a big occasion or event. Or maybe you’re arranging seating structures and traffic flows that are more permanent. Either way, creating a floor plan—an overhead scaled diagram of the space—is equal parts functional and fun. This template will let you visualize how people will move about the space and know quickly if the space will do what you need, before you commit time, money, or resources. And you’ll be able to get as detailed as you want—finding the right measurements and dimensions, and adding or removing appliances and furniture.
Corrective Action Plan
For a manager or HR leader, it’s the least fun part of the job: Documenting an employee’s performance issues and talking about them directly to that employee. A corrective action plan makes that tough task a little easier by putting issues into a professional, written framework. That way the process, next steps, and details of the conversations are all clearly documented. This template will enable you to eliminate murky communication, align on expectations, and provide step-by-step instructions for your employee.
Buyer Persona
You have an ideal customer: The group (or few groups) of people who will buy and love your product or service. But to reach that ideal customer, your entire team or company has to align on who that is. Buyer personas give you a simple but creative way to get that done. These semi-fictional representations of your current and potential customers can help you shape your product offering, weed out the “bad apples,” and tailor your marketing strategies for serious success.
AARRR
Sometimes called “Pirate Metrics” because of the name (go ahead, say it, it’s fun), AARRR is a valuable approach for startups to consider. That’s because AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue—five key types of user behavior that are highly measurable and drive growth. Ask and answer the right questions around each of these five factors, and you’ll be able to establish clear goals and identify the best steps to help reach them.
3 Horizons of Growth
Featured in The Alchemy of Growth, this model gives ambitious companies a way to balance the present and the future—in other words, what’s working in the existing business and what emerging, possibly-profitable growth opportunities lie ahead. Then teams across the organization can make sure that their projects map to and support the organization’s goals. The 3 Horizons of Growth model is also a powerful way to foster a culture of innovation—one that values and depends on experimentation and iteration—and to identify opportunities for new business.
Market Segmentation Matrix
Successful, compelling marketing begins and ends with knowing your audience — who they are, where they are, and what they want and expect. A market segmentation matrix will help you understand them on a deeper level. This business tool divides your target market into subsets based on demographics, geography, needs, interests, psychographics, or behavioral characteristics. You can then use these insights and data to hit it out of the park, by building better product, sales, and marketing strategies. Our template lets you set up and populate a Market Segmentation Matrix with ease.
Event Brief
For most any organization, throwing a big deal event is…a big deal. An event can bring in publicity, new clients, and revenue. And planning it can require a substantial chunk of your overall resources. That’s why you’ll want to approach it like a high-stakes project, with clearly outlined goals, stakeholders, timelines, and budget. An event brief combines all of that information in a single source of truth that guides the events team, coordinator, or agency—and ensures the event is well-planned and well-executed.
DevOps Roadmap
DevOps teams are constantly creating code, iterating, and pushing it live. Against this backdrop of continuous development, it can be hard to stay abreast of your projects. Use this DevOps Roadmap template to get a granular view of the product development process and how it fits into your organization's product strategy. The DevOps Roadmap lays out the development and operations initiatives you have planned in the short term, including milestones and dependencies. This easy-to-use format is easily digestible for audiences such as product, development, and IT ops.
Burndown Chart
Whoa whoa whoa, pace yourself! That means knowing how much work is left—and, based on the delivery date, how much time you’ll have for each task. Perfect for project managers, Burndown Charts create a clear visualization of a team’s remaining work to help get it done on time and on budget. These charts have other big benefits, too. They encourage transparency and help individual team members be aware of their work pace so they can adjust or maintain it.
Balanced Scorecard
Communicate your team’s goals clearly and measure your progress accurately. Nothing to it, right? Actually, it’s a fundamental challenge for many companies. A Balanced Scorecard is here to help. It puts a series of Strategy Maps on one screen—in one source of truth—which lays out team member tasks and sets them up to succeed. If you put your Balanced Scorecard to work the right way (and Miro makes that easy), you’ll improve in three key areas: strategic planning, strategic communication, and performance reporting.
3x3 Prioritization Method
It’s all about assessing a task or idea, and quickly deciding the effort it will take and the potential impact it will have—ranked low, medium, or high. That’s what the 3x3 prioritization method does: Help teams prioritize and identify quick wins, big projects, filler tasks, or time-wasters. With nine bucket areas, it offers slightly greater detail than the 2x2 Prioritization Matrix (or Lean Prioritization Method). It’s easy to make your own 3x3 prioritization matrix—then use it to determine what activities or ideas to focus on with your valuable resources.
Impact/Effort Matrix
Growing organizations have countless to-do’s and only so many hours in a day (or weeks before a big launch) to get them done. That’s where an impact effort matrix comes in. It gives you a quick visual guide to help prioritize your tasks and know exactly what’s worth doing. Using our template, you can create a matrix that organizes your activities into four main categories: quick wins that are low effort, effort-intensive projects that provide long-term returns, fill-ins that are low effort but low value, and time-wasters.
2x2 Prioritization Matrix
Ready to set boundaries, prioritize your to-dos, and determine just what features, fixes, and upgrades to tackle next? The 2x2 prioritization matrix is a great place to start. Based on the lean prioritization approach, this template empowers teams with a quick, efficient way to know what's realistic to accomplish and what’s crucial to separate for success (versus what’s simply nice to have). And guess what—making your own 2x2 prioritization matrix is easy.
Strategy Map
How do your individual or team goals relate to an organization’s overall strategy? A Strategy Map is a stylized picture of your organization’s strategy and objectives. It’s powerful because it provides a clear visual guide to how these various elements work together. Strategy Maps can help align various different team goals with the overall strategy and mission. With the Strategy Map in place, teams can create set actionable, relevant KPIs. Strategy mapping is often considered part of the balanced scorecard (BSC) methodology, which is a strategic planning tool for setting overall team goals.
Business Model Canvas
Your business model: Nothing is more fundamental to who you are, what you create and sell, or ultimately whether or not you succeed. Using nine key building blocks (representing nine core business elements), a BMC gives you a highly usable strategic tool to develop and display your business model. What makes this template great for your team? It’s quick and easy to use, it keeps your value proposition front and center, and it creates a space to inspire ideation.
4P Marketing Mix
So you just completed a sprint. Teams busted their humps and emotions ran high. Now take a clear-eyed look back and grade the sprint honestly—what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved. This approach (4Ls stand for liked, learned, lacked, and longed for) is an invaluable way to remove the emotion and look at the process critically. That’s how you can build trust, improve morale, and increase engagement—as well as make adjustments to be more productive and successful in the future.
Monthly Planner
To knock out every task and accomplish every goal for the month, it helps to take a big picture, 10,000 foot view of things—meaning a 30-day view. That’s why a monthly calendar can come in so handy, especially on bigger projects. Use our template to create a visual representation that helps you track and space out every deadline and to-do, both for individuals and full teams. You’ll even be able to customize it your way, with images, video, and sticky notes.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
With so many day-to-day decisions to make—and each one feeling high-stakes—it’s easy for all the choices to weigh a business or organization down. You need a systematic way to analyze the risks and rewards. A cost benefit analysis gives you the clarity you need to make smart decisions. This template will let you conduct a CBA to help your team assess the pros and cons of new projects or business proposals—and ultimately help your company preserve your precious time, money, and social capital.
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