Select Page

Product Management Toolkit: Templates and Canvases

Here’s a detailed guide on the essential tools that should be a part of any product manager’s arsenal.

Customer Discovery

Customer Persona – in many organisations the target customer or user seems too obvious to document, but if you don’t do it then a lot of assumptions and misunderstandings can go unchallenged. Traditionally marketing owned this document. Although marketing and sales have a different use for the persona it is important to have a shared understanding of the people you are trying to help with your product. In a product team, if you have a Product or UX designer, they would own building this document. As a product manager, if you can’t find a customer persona, you may have to build one yourself and socialise to get agreement from the rest of the organisation.

Figjam Customer Persona Template

Customer Journey Template is another powerful tool in the product manager’s toolkit, designed to map the customer journey visually. Mapping out user journeys help the team understand and document the different stages a customer goes through when trying to solve a problem or when interacting with a product or service. You can use a journey map to map the stages a customer goes through when trying to solve the problem you are focused on helping with, or when trying to use your product or service or a competitor’s product or service. Quick user journey mapping exercises are useful at the beginning of new feature development for existing products, where the plan is to change or optimise the user experience or help digitise a new process.

FigJam Customer Journey Template

Product Discovery Tools

Opportunity Solution Tree: Facilitates identification of customer problems and maps out potential solutions, helping to focus efforts on impactful activities. This is Terresa Torres’s product discovery tool. 

Miro Opportunity Solution Tree Template

Business Model Canvas: This visual tool includes nine building blocks that comprehensively view a company’s business model. It helps teams articulate how to create, deliver, and capture value. The nine blocks are Key Partners, Key Activities, Key Resources, Value Propositions, Customer Relationships, Channels, Customer Segments, Cost Structure, and Revenue Streams.
When to use: Early-stage startups before Product Market Fit (PMF). Onboarding new people to the organisation. It helps flush out the business viability aspects of product discovery. Can work in established companies where you are exploring a brand new product line.

Explore the Business Model Canvas

The Experiment Library: This excellent library of experimentation techniques helps teams design, track, and learn from experiments aimed at validating business hypotheses. This structured approach allows for more informed decision-making around product features and market strategies. It helps product manager’s understand what experiment to run when.

Discover the Experiment Library

The Innovation Project Scorecard: This scorecard is used to evaluate and prioritize different innovation projects based on their strategic alignment, potential impact, and feasibility.

Check out the Innovation Project Scorecard

The Fact Finder: This is a tool for gathering and organizing insights about customers, market conditions, and other external factors that impact your product.

Explore The Fact Finder

Miro Design SprintSprint A set period during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review. Sprints typically last about two to four weeks and allow teams to break down complex projects into manageable chunks and focus on high-priority tasks. Board: Template for conducting a full 5-day design sprint, which is a methodology for solving problems through designing, prototyping, and testing ideas with users.

Miro Design Sprint Board

Product Strategy

Product Strategy Canvas: Helps define and communicate a product’s vision and strategic direction.

Product Strategy Canvas by Product Compass

Product School Project Strategy Template – this isn’t a bad PowerPoint Template

Roman Pichler’s Product Strategy Framework and Canvas

Roadmaps

Mural Resilient Product Roadmap: Integrates multiple templates to help visualize and plan the product’s journey.

Visit Mural’s Resilient Product Roadmap

Outcome Driven Roadmap Template: Focuses on the outcomes rather than features or outputs, aiming to align the product development efforts with business goals.

Outcome Driven Roadmap Guide

Metrics

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) Miro Template

Facilitating Team Collaboration

Roles and responsibilities mapping template. Given the amount of potential for overlap of ownership with other roles and points of collaboration, I’d say mapping out roles and responsibilities is an essential task for product managers to lead on. Here’s a template

Stakeholder mapping template. Marty Cagan describes stakeholders as people within your organisation who can stop what you are doing – this usually means C-Suite or senior leadership. Here’s a template to understand who your stakeholders are.

The Team Contract: Essential for team governance, this tool helps establish norms, expectations, and collaborative agreements among team members.

View The Team Contract

Product Management Template Collections

Miro Product Management Templates

Product School Templates: Includes various ready-to-use templates like a product strategy template and others essential for product management tasks.

Product School Templates

Pawel Huryn’s Compendium of Product Management Frameworks: An extensive collection of frameworks that cover various aspects of product management. The Product Frameworks Compendium

Roman Pichler’s Product Management Tools