Product Inception Canvas
Want an easy tool to help you start building great products that people love?
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
That’s exactly what the Product Inception Canvas is: a practical worksheet to help you, your business people, your stakeholders, and everyone else on your team discover exactly what to do next as you build and extend your product.
The Product Inception Canvas facilitates alignment among business people, product development teams, and stakeholders. We begin by identifying, discussing, and aligning on our company vision and product vision: Who are we? Why do we exist? How will the world be different and better because of the work we are doing? Next, we identify stakeholders and bring them to life as user personas: Who cares about the work we are doing? Who are they, really, including all their details? Finally, we put it all together into a product backlog—an ordered to-do list of everything we want to be true about our product in the future: What are the wants and needs of our stakeholders? What problems will we solve for them? Which problems should we solve first to maximize their joy?
This template was created by Richard Kasperowski.
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User Story Map Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, Mapping
Popularized by Jeff Patton in 2005, the user story mapping technique is an agile way to manage product backlogs. Whether you’re working alone or with a product team, you can leverage user story mapping to plan product releases. User story maps help teams stay focused on the business value and release features that customers care about. The framework helps to get a shared understanding for the cross-functional team of what needs to be done to satisfy customers' needs.
Design Brief Template
Works best for:
Design, Marketing, UX Design
For a design to be successful, let alone to be great, design agencies and teams have to know the project’s goals, timelines, budget, and scope. In other words, design takes a strategic process—and that starts with a design brief. This helpful template will empower you to create a brief that builds alignment and clear communication between your business and your design agency. It’s the foundation of any creative project, and a single source of truth that teams can refer to all along the way.
Action Plan Template
Works best for:
Education, Project Management, Project Planning, Kanban
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.
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.
Lean Coffee Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Product Management, Meetings
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.
Swimlane Diagram Template
Works best for:
Flowcharts, Diagrams, Workflows
A swimlane diagram shows you which stakeholders are responsible for each area of your critical processes. You can use it to understand current processes or plan new ones.