Product Management templates
Simplify your workflows and optimize your daily routines with our collection of product management templates.
UX Research Plan
A research plan communicates the fundamental information that stakeholders need to understand about a user experience research project: who, what, why, and when. The plan ensures everyone is aligned and knows what they must do to make the UX research project a success. Use the research plan to communicate background information about your project; objectives; research methods; the scope of the project, and profiles of the participants. By using a UX research plan, you can achieve stakeholder buy-in, stay on track, and set yourself up for success.
User Flow
User flows are diagrams that help UX and product teams map out the logical path a user should take when interacting with a system. As a visual tool, the user flow shows the relationship between a website or app’s functionality, potential actions a user could take, and the outcome of what the user decides to do. User flows help you understand what a user does to finish a task or complete a goal through your product or experience.
Customer Journey Map (Timeline)
To attract and keep loyal customers, you have to truly start to understand them—their pain point, wants, and needs. A customer journey map (CJM) helps you gain that understanding by visualizing the path your customers follow, from signing up for a service, to using your site, to buying your product. And because no two customers are exactly alike, a CJM lets you plot out multiple pathways through your product. Soon you’ll be able to anticipate those pathways and satisfy your customers at every step.
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.
Product Roadmap
Product development roadmaps cover everything your team needs to achieve when delivering a product from concept to market launch. Your product development roadmap is also a team alignment tool that offers guidance and leadership to help your team focus on balancing product innovation and meeting your customer’s needs. Investing time in creating a roadmap focused on your product development phases helps your team communicate a vision to business leaders, designers, developers, project managers, marketers, and anyone else who influences meeting team goals.
Change Control Process
You can predict, research, and plan for every detail of a project to go a certain way—then along comes the unforeseen and modifications are needed. That’s when a change control process comes into play. It helps define the right steps to take, gives stakeholders full visibility, and reduces the chances of errors and disruption. And this template is easy to use and highly effective—for ensuring that proposed changes are reviewed before they’re implemented, and empowering teams to veto changes that might prove unnecessary or disruptive.
Blue Ocean 4 Actions Framework
For entrepreneurs, so much comes down to new users—how to attract them, impress them, and convert them to loyal customers. This template, designed by the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant, will help you maximize value for you and your customers alike. Using the template’s four steps (divided into easy columns), you’ll easily evaluate your products in more innovative ways and make sure money is being spent in areas that really matter.
Bang for the Buck
The name pretty much says it—this Agile framework is all about helping you maximize efficiency by powering collaboration between product managers and dev teams. Together you can go over each to-do on the project agenda and evaluate them in terms of costs and benefits. That way you can prioritize tasks based on how much bang for your buck they deliver. This template is great for teams and organizations that want to make a strategic plan to tackle an upcoming sprint.
User Interview
A user interview is a UX research technique in which researchers ask the user questions about a topic. They allow your team to quickly and easily collect user data and learn more about your users. In general, organizations conduct user interviews to gather background data, to understand how people use technology, to take a snapshot of how users interact with a product, to understand user objectives and motivations, and to find users’ pain points. Use this template to record notes during an interview to ensure you’re gathering the data you need to create personas.
Screen Flow
A screen flow (or wireflow) brings together a multi-screen layout that combines wireframes with flowcharts. The result is an end-to-end flow that maps out what users see on each screen and how it impacts their decision-making process through your product or service. By thinking visually about what your customers are looking at, you can communicate with internal teams, stakeholders, and clients about the decisions you’ve made. You can also use a screen flow to find new opportunities to make the user experience frictionless and free of frustration from start to end.
SAFe Roam Board
A SAFe ROAM Board is a framework for making risks visible. It gives you and your team a shared space to notice and highlight risks, so they don’t get ignored. The ROAM Board helps everyone consider the likelihood and impact of risks, and decide which risks are low priority versus high priority. The underlying principles of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) are: drive cost-effective solutions, apply systems thinking, assume that things will change, build incrementally, base milestones on evaluating working systems, and visualize and limit works in progress.
Kano Model
When it comes down to it, a product’s success is determined by the features it offers and the satisfaction it gives to customers. So which features matter most? The Kano model will help you decide. It’s a simple, powerful method for helping you prioritize all your features — by comparing how much satisfaction a feature will deliver to what it will cost to implement. This template lets you easily create a standard Kano model, with two axes (satisfaction and functionality) creating a quadrant with four values: attractive, performance, indifferent, and must-be.
Impact Mapping
When you’re building products and shipping goods (oh, and everything in between) there’s nothing more important than staying organized and on-task. Impact mapping is a great way to do it. This trusty product planning technique creates a graphical representation of all your goals and the steps it’ll take to reach each one — so you can clearly communicate with your teammates, align on business objectives, and build better roadmaps. Our template will help you do impact mapping for any type of project planning.
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.
Scenario Mapping
Scenario mapping is the process of outlining all the steps a user will take to complete a task. The scenario mapping template helps you create a visual guide to what different personas are doing, thinking, and feeling in different situations. Use scenario mapping to outline an intended or ideal scenario (what should happen) as well as what currently happens. If you’re trying to outline the ideal scenario, user mapping should take place very early on in a project and can help inform user stories and the product backlog. If you’re just trying to get a better sense of what currently happens, you can do user mapping when conducting user interviews or observation.
SAFe Program
Many organizations use the Agile model, but even companies that don’t rigorously adhere to all Agile standards have adopted Agile tools and methods like Program Increment (PI) Planning. Even if you’re not participating in a formal PI session, a program board can be a great way to establish communication across teams and stakeholders, align development objectives with business goals, clarify dependencies, and foster cross-functional collaboration. The board provides much-needed structure to planning sessions, yet is adaptable enough to accommodate brainstorming and alignment meetings.
Research Topic Brainstorm
Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.
Research Design
A design research map is a grid framework showing the relationship between two key intersections in research methodologies: mindset and approach. Design research maps encourage your team or clients to develop new business strategies using generative design thinking. Originally designed by academic Liz Sanders, the framework is meant to resolve confusion or overlap between research and design methods. Whether your team is in problem-solving or problem space definition mode, using a research design template can help you consider the collective value of many unrelated practices.
Product/Market Fit Canvas
The product/market fit canvas template is used to help product teams meet customer and market needs with their product design. This template looks at a product in two dimensions: first, how the product fits user needs, and second, how the fully designed product fits within the market landscape. This combined metric understands a product holistically from the way customers use and desire a product, to the market demand. By comparing customer and product qualities side by side, users should better understand their product space and key metrics.
Product Canvas
Product canvases are a concise yet content-rich tool that conveys what your product is and how it is strategically positioned. Combining Agile and UX, a project canvas complements user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches, and other UX artefacts. Product canvases are useful because they help product managers define a prototype. Creating a product canvas is an important first step in deciding who potential users may be, the problem to be solved, basic product functionality, advanced functionalities worth exploring, competitive advantage, and customers’ potential gain from the product.
Product Backlog
Development teams are often juggling many products at once. A product backlog is a project management tool that helps teams keep track of projects in flight as they build and iterate, so you can store everyone's ideas, plan epics, and prioritize tasks. The highest-priority tasks are at the top of the product backlog, so your team knows what to work on first. Product backlogs make it easier for teams to plan and allocate resources, but it also provides a single source of truth for everyone to know what development teams are working on.
Lean Coffee
What makes a great meeting (other than donuts)? It’s appreciating everyone’s skills, resources, and time by making the very best use of them. That’s what the Lean Coffee approach is designed to do. Great for team brainstorms and retrospectives, Lean Coffee breaks the meeting into three basic stages: what to discuss, what’s being discussed, and what’s been discussed. This template makes it easy for you to collect sticky notes and to update the columns as you go from topic to topic.
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.
Card Sorting
Card sorting is a brainstorming technique typically used by design teams but applicable to any brainstorm or team. The method is designed to facilitate more efficient and creative brainstorms. In a card sorting exercise, you and your team create groups out of content, objects, or ideas. You begin by labeling a deck of cards with information related to the topic of the brainstorm. Working as a group or individuals, you then sort the cards in a way that makes sense to you, then label each group with a short description. Card sorting allows you to form unexpected but meaningful connections between ideas.
UML Diagram
Originally used as a modeling language in software engineering, UML has become a popular approach to application structures and documenting software. UML stands for Unified Modeling Language, and you can use it to model business processes and workflows. Like flowcharts, UML diagrams can provide your organization with a standardized method of mapping out step-by-step processes. They allow your team to easily view the relationships between systems and tasks. UML diagrams are an effective tool that can help you bring new employees up to speed, create documentation, organize your workplace and team, and streamline your projects.
Process Map
Process mapping allows you to assess, document, and strategize around any plan or approach your team has put in place. It’s a useful tool for eliminating or preventing blockers. Organized by stages, a process map enables your team to divide up a process or system and record deliverables and action items at each stage of the process. By breaking down the objectives, activities and deliverables at any stage of a project, you can gain insight into whether you are on track or effectively working through a problem.
Value Stream Map
Value stream mapping is a method of depicting the flow of materials and information necessary to bring a product to a customer. It’s simple: you use a series of symbols to showcase work streams and information flows, and another symbol to indicate whether those items add value. You can thereby figure out which items are not adding value from the customer’s standpoint. Value stream mapping results in better communication and collaboration. Use the value stream map template to understand knowledge gaps in handoffs between team members and across teams. An effective value stream map helps identify waste, foster collaboration, and streamline production.
Online Sketching
Before you go full steam ahead with a promising idea, look at it from a high level — to know how it functions and how well it meets your goals. That’s what sketches do. This template gives you a powerful remote collaboration tool for the initial stages of prototyping, whether you’re sketching out web pages and mobile apps, designing logos, or planning events. Then you can easily share your sketch with your team, and save each stage of your sketch before changing it and building on it.
Example Mapping
To update your product in valuable ways—to recognize problem areas, add features, and make needed improvements—you have to walk in your users’ shoes. Example mapping (or user story mapping) can give you that perspective by helping cross-functional teams identify how users behave in different situations. These user stories are ideal for helping organizations form a development plan for Sprint planning or define the minimum amount of features needed to be valuable to customers.
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.
Technology Roadmap
A technology roadmap helps teams document the rationale of when, why, how, and what tech-related solutions can help the company move forward. Also known as IT roadmaps, technology roadmaps show teams what technology is available to them, focusing on to-be-scheduled improvements. They allow you to identify gaps or overlap between phased-out tech tools, as well as software or programs soon to be installed. From a practical point of view, the roadmap should also outline what kinds of tools are best to spend money on, and the most effective way to introduce new systems and processes.
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.
Research
Teams often need to document findings from usability testing sessions and customer interviews into a systematic, flexible user research template. Collecting everyone’s observations into a centralized location makes it easier to share insights company-wide and suggest new features based on user needs. Research templates can be used to record quantitative or qualitative data.. When it’s your job to ask questions, take notes, learn more about your user, and test iteratively, a Research Template can help you validate your assumptions, find similarities across different users, and articulate their mental models, needs, and goals.
Swimlane Diagram
When processes start to get messy, it’s a good idea to take a step back and visualize who does what and when. A swimlanes diagram takes a familiar, everyday physical place (a lap pool) and turns the idea of “swimlanes” into a metaphor for organizing processes within a team, work group, department, or multilayered organization. This digestible, one-stop visual representation uses the metaphor of lanes in a pool to clarify a complex process. Use a swimlanes diagram to clarify roles before a major project, to bring a new hire up to speed, to update your organizational structure, and much more.
Affinity Diagram
You can use an affinity diagram to generate, organize, and consolidate information that comes out of a brainstorming session. Whether you’re building a product, working through a complex problem, establishing a process, or piecing apart an issue, an affinity diagram is a useful and simple framework that gives each team member the opportunity to pitch in and share their thoughts. But it’s not just ideal for brainstorms—this is a great template and tool when you need to reach consensus or analyze data such as survey results.
App Development Canvas
Ever noticed that building a successful app requires lots of players and moving parts? If you’re a project manager, you definitely have. Lucky for you, an app development canvas will let you own and optimize the entire process. It features 18 boxes, each one focusing on a key aspect of app development, giving you a big-picture view. That way you can fine-tune processes and get ahead of potential problems along the way—resulting in a smoother path and a better, tighter product.
Features Audit
Add new features or improve existing features—those are the two paths toward improving a product. But which should you take? A features audit will help you decide. This easy, powerful product management tool will give you a way to examine all of your features, then gather research and have detailed discussions about the ones that simply aren’t working. Then you can decide if you should increase those features’ visibility or the frequency with which it’s used—or if you should remove it altogether.
Likert Scale
It’s not always easy to measure complex, highly subjective data — like how people feel about your product, service, or experience. But the Likert scale is designed to help you do it. This scale allows your existing or potential customers to respond to a statement or question with a range of phrases or numbers (e.g., from “strongly agree” to “neutral,” to “strongly disagree,” or from 1 to 5). The goal is to ask your customer some specific questions to turn into easy-to-interpret actionable user insights.
Customer Problem Statement
A company of any size or kind needs to be able to make its case—by clearly articulating how its product will meet customers’ needs. A customer problem statement will help make that case a compelling one. How? You’ll dive into your customers’ thoughts and feelings, which ups your odds of creating something they will find valuable. And a problem statement does more than deliver big for your customers—it helps your teams align around a common, clearly defined goal, and feel invested in achieving it.
Conversion Funnel Backlog
If you’re working on a product that has clear conversions, then it can help to structure your backlog around the conversion funnel to make sure you’re reaching your audience. Creating a conversion funnel backlog brings together information around potential pain-points in your funnel and opportunities for growth. Once you’ve identified that information, it becomes easier to prioritize. You and your team can use the conversion funnel backlog to focus on conversion, retention, and referral, or to tweak your workflow in more mature products.
Official 5-Day Design Sprint
The goal of a Design Sprint is to build and test a prototype in just five days. You'll take a small team, clear the schedule for a week, and rapidly progress from problem to tested solution using a proven step-by-step checklist. Steph Cruchon of Design Sprint created this template for Miro in collaboration with design sprint gurus at Google. This Design Sprint template is designed specifically for remote sprints so you can run productive and efficient sprints with colleagues around the world.
How Now Wow Matrix
There are no bad ideas in a brainstorm — but some are more original and easier to implement. The How Now Wow matrix is a tool that helps you identify and organize those great ideas, as well as reinvigorates your team to think creatively and take risks (a taller order as you scale). Grab this template to create your own matrix, then rank the ideas you generated in a brainstorm as “How” (difficult to implement), “Now” (easy to implement), or “Wow” (both original and easy to implement).
Stickies Packs
Sticky notes are a popular feature of any virtual, hybrid, or in-person brainstorming session. Participants can use sticky notes to submit, sort, or vote for ideas -- and much more. Use the Stickies Packs template to customize groups of sticky notes for your participants. You can then break your participants into groups according to the color of their sticky notes, or categorize ideas based on color, and so on. The Stickies Packs template empowers you to create brainstorming sessions that fit your needs and align with your goals.
Lean UX Canvas
What are you building, why are building it, and who are you building it for? Those are the big pictures questions that guide great companies and teams toward success — and Lean UX helps you find the answers. Especially helpful during project research, design, and planning, this tool lets you quickly make product improvements and solve business problems, leading to a more customer-centric product. This template will let you create a Lean UX canvas structured around eight key elements: Business problem, Business outcome, Users and customers, User benefits, Solution ideas, Hypothesis, Assumptions, Experimentation.
Opportunity Solution Tree
Solving problems — successful companies and productive teams just know how to do it. They’re able to identify many possible solutions, then settle on the one that leads to the desired outcome. That’s the power an Opportunity Solution Tree gives you. Designed by Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach, this mind map breaks down your desired outcome into opportunities for the product to meet user needs, then gives your team an effective way to brainstorm potential solutions.
Technology Product Canvas
Originally created by Prem Sundaram, the Technology Product Canvas allows product and engineering teams to achieve alignment about their shared roadmap. The canvas combines agile methodologies with UX principles to help validate product solutions. Each team states and visualizes both product and technology goals, then discusses each stage of the roadmap explicitly. This exercise ensures the teams are in sync and everyone leaves with clear expectations and direction. By going through the process of creating a Technology Product Canvas, you can start managing alignment between the teams -- in under an hour.
Timeline Workflow
A timeline is a visual tool that chronologically plots out projects step by step. It’s an ideal tool for your team to tell stories (such as an overview of events in your organization) and visualize your projects or processes. The Timeline Workflow template is perfect for any project that relies on visual content. You may find it beneficial to use with your team and also to share with other stakeholders or clients to keep them in the loop on your progress.
UX Project Canvas
Inspired by Alexander Osterwalder's 2005 business model canvas, the project canvas will help your team visualize the big picture of your UX and design projects, providing a convenient structure that holds all of your important data. This innovative tool enables you to transform an idea into a project plan, stimulating collaboration and communication between collaborators. Unlike alternative models, the project canvas is a simple interface. There are few startup costs, and employees can easily be brought up to speed to start using the canvas quickly.
Venn Diagram
Venn Diagrams have been a staple of business meetings and presentations since the 1800s, and there’s a good reason why. Venn diagrams provide a clear, effective way to visually showcase relationships between datasets. They serve as a helpful visual aid in brainstorming sessions, meetings, and presentations. You start by drawing a circle containing one concept, and then draw an overlapping circle containing another concept. In the space where the circles overlap, you can make note of the concepts’ similarities. In the space where they do not, you can make note of their differences.
Product Roadmap (Basic)
Product roadmaps help communicate the vision and progress of what’s coming next for your product. It’s an important asset for aligning teams and valuable stakeholders – including executives, engineering, marketing, customer success, and sales – around your strategy and priorities. Product roadmapping can inform future project management, describe new features and product goals, and spell out the lifecycle of a new product. While product roadmaps are customizable, most contain information about the products you’re building, when you’re building them, and the people involved at each stage.
Feature Canvas
When you’re working on a new feature that solves a problem for your users, it’s easy to dive right in and start looking for solutions. However, it’s important to understand the initial user problem first. Use the Feature Canvas template to do a deep-dive into the user’s problems, the context in which they will use your feature, and the value proposition you will deliver to your users. The template enables you to spend more time exploring the problem to anticipate any potential blind spots before jumping into solutions mode.
App Wireframe
Ready to start building an app? Don’t just imagine how it will function and how users will interact with it—let a wireframe show you. Wireframing is a technique for creating a basic layout of each screen. When you wireframe, ideally early in the process, you’ll gain an understanding of what each screen will accomplish and get buy-in from important stakeholders—all before adding the design and content, which will save you time and money. And by thinking of things in terms of a user’s journey, you’ll deliver a more compelling, successful experience.
Look Mock Analyze
Doing your homework (aka, the research) is a key step in your design process, and the Look, Mock, Analyze approach helps you examine, structure, and streamline that step. With this powerful tool you’ll be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses, what you did right or wrong, and whether you spent time efficiently. Our Look, Mock, Analyze template makes it so easy for you to discover inspiration, mock up designs, and get feedback — you can start by setting up your board in less than a minute.
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