Six Templates for Aspiring Product Managers

The cheat sheet I wish I had before I became a product manager.

My path into product management — like many others — was a non-traditional one. I started in advertising as an art director, later moved into user experience design and product design, then finally ended up in product management.

There’s been a lot of self-learning along the way. Some from reading as much as I can (thanks, Product Coalition and Medium!) but most has been learned on the job, for better or worse.

Looking back, one of the biggest pieces of advice I wish someone had given me before I got into product management is actually a very simple one:

Write everything down. It’s the most important requirement of a product manager’s job.

It took me a while to learn the importance of this and am only now just catching up. If you are thinking of getting into product management and you don’t like to write, you are going to have a hard time. I know this because I don’t like to write.

To ease the pain, I have created a handful of templates I use for all the miscellaneous writing tasks that fall on my desk daily. I offer them here for you to use and give feedback on. And I’d love to hear if you find them helpful or have templates of your own to share.

Template One

Roadmap Outline

This is a biggie. Getting a handle of the roadmap is critical not only for you to do your job, but also for your entire team. And a good roadmap starts with a clear outline. At Notion, we divide our roadmap into quarters and organize it by themes.

Roadmap visibility aligns the team around the company’s goals for success.

Our roadmap document follows the following format:

Q1: Theme, date range
A short description of the theme—typically centered around company or product growth goals

- Feature Milestones
A list of product features that will define success for this quarter

- Customer Success Milestones
A list of customer features that will define success for the quarter

- Growth Goals
A list of growth numbers we are trying to hit

Repeat as needed for each quarter. Your goal should be to have the next quarter as tight as possible, with the next quarter being broad strokes, and two quarters out being even broader. Tighten as time goes so you can react to changes.

Template Two

Project/Feature Briefs

Once you have an outline, your next step is breaking it down. That’s where briefs come in. We visualize our roadmap in ProductPlan and attached to each feature we try to link to a brief that we keep in Paper.

In my advertising days, a strong creative brief would be the difference between a successful campaign or not.

For product development, a feature brief can be just as influential as a creative brief.

Feel free to add or subtract on a per-feature basis, but we make sure every brief covers at least the following:

What have we already built?
A short description of existing and related features that give context to the new project.

What are we building next?
A high level overview of the project scope.

Why are we working on this next?
Align effort with business goals to make sure everyone is onboard.

What problems do we need to solve?
Identify unknowns, areas of risk, and known challenges that need to be resolved before developement can begin.

What future considerations need to be accounted for?
Are there future features or business goals that will build on top of this feature? Goal is to not design ourselves into a corner now if we know about something in the future.

What are our KPIs for this test?
List metrics and goals that measure the success of the feature.

Another approach to the brief is to use the format Melissa Perri systematized with her Product Kata approach.

Template Three

Weekly Recaps

Each Monday (sometimes Tuesday), I send an email digest of the previous week to our team and advisors. Any company, especially a young startup, has a lot of moving pieces and it’s hard to keep everyone up-to-date daily when they are focused on their own work. So we use Reportedly — an excellent tool from Justin Thiele and Rick Turoczy — to recap everything that has happened. (h/t to Mara Zepeda for introducing me to this tool and exercise.) One of the biggest benefits of documenting each week is it provides a history that new hires can browse at their leisure to get a better understanding of how the team got to the present.

Reportedly gives you a quick overview of who has read the updates as well.

Here’s what my weekly recap looks like…

Dev sprint wrap-up/kick-off
Depending on the week (we work in two week sprints), I’ll provide a brief overview into what work we just delivered or just started working on. In addition, I’ll include reports we pull out of Notion from the team retro.

Growth sprint wrap-up
Same as above. We run weekly sprints with our growth team. Recap here focuses on marketing and sales efforts over the previous week.

The rundown
Any day to day activity or updates that fall outside of sprint work. Dave, my partner and CEO also includes detailed notes on the following areas:
- Growth
- Fundraising
- Hiring

Customer Feedback
This is a great way to keep the team up-to-date on what is and isn’t working with the product.

Upcoming milestones
Bullet list of growth and roadmap milestones

What are we reading?
We keep a #reading-list Slack channel. If anything pops up there that’s worth an extra look, it gets captured here as well.

Template Four

Daily Stand-ups

We tend to keep things pretty casual in our office. That includes when people arrive to work. So rather than interrupting workflows or requiring the team to be in by a certain time, we do our stand-ups at the end of the day and via Slack.

At 4:30pm, IFTTT sends a message to the #stand-up channel and the team updates everyone on their accomplishments for the day and focus for tomorrow. This allows us to share links to mockups or tickets we are working on and gives the team time to process blocking issues more easily.

Today
A list of what you got done today.

Tomorrow
A list of what you plan to work on tomorrow.

Blocking
A list of blocking issues and @-replies to anyone who can help.

Template Five

Release Notes

We work in two week sprints and we release on that same frequency. That ends up being a lot of release notes to write, but as always, sticking to a template helps.

tl;dr
Sometimes readers just want a quick summary.

Released
A more detailed explanation of each feature, where to find it, how to use it, etc.

Fixed/Updated
If bugs are part of the release, quick and to-the-point notes are essential to communicate.

Feel free to check out our actual release notes to see it in action.

Template Six

Daily To-Do List

Last on the list, but by no means any less important to any above it.

Each morning, I take 5 minutes to write down my must dos and my nice to dos. This helps me prioritize my day and I’m not sure I would get anything done without it.

Must Dos
Try to limit this to three to five high priority items.

Nice To Dos
Priority is key here as well. Only start on these if you get through your Must Dos or become blocked by any of them.

Tools to get the job done

Unfortunately, there’s not one single tool that can capture all this. Make sure you have clear definition though of what tools you use for what job, otherwise you will constantly be trying to remember “Where did I write that down?”

Evernote
My daily to-do list, scratchpad, meeting notes, etc.

Hackpad/Dropbox Paper
Project briefs and the roadmap outline. We started in Hackpad but are moving to Paper.

Google Docs
We used Google Docs for more temporal documents or items that need collaboration, editing, and history tracking.

Slack
Stand-ups and daily communication.

Moleskine/Field Notes
Just like the best camera is the one you have with you, my Field Notes and Moleskine are always in my backpack when ever I have to jot down a quick note or sketch out a UI implementation.

Reportedly
As mentioned above, our weekly status reports are handled completely in Reportedly.

ProductPlan
The actual roadmap itself lives here.

So there you have it—written documentation about how I document all the things I write. How meta.

Kevin Steigerwald is the co-founder of Notion, focused on helping good teams build, measure, and learn with data.

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