I’m excited by a new generation of software tools for product managers, product owners and product planners.
Accompa, Aha!, ProdPad, ProductPlan, productboard, Pendo, Reqqs (beta) and Validately focus on product planning: requirements, roadmaps and customer collaboration. Jama and OneDesk include prodmgmt in broader suites. Please give some of these a try, and let me know if you’ve found others.
Remember that your development teams will get to pick their own project/agile/ticket tracking system (Rally, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, VersionOne, Mingle, GitHub, ScrumWorks…). So be sure that your product management tools play nicely with the Engineering system-of-record.
Also, from my pre-cloud archive of stand-alone document, here are some historical templates I’ve found useful. Most are filled with fanciful information to give you a sense of what belongs: I can’t confirm (or deny) working on teleportation hardware or ESP-based password protection…
Early Product Planning
- Traditional Marketing Requirements (MRD) Document Template for teleportation (MS Word)
- “Whole product” Bill of Materials (BOM) Checklist (MS Word)
- Positioning template | Courtesy of Gary Pine (MS Word)
Pricing and Forecasting
- Simple customer savings/ROI template (Excel)
- Simple business model/business plan spreadsheet. Can you map out key variables for your product’s first year? (Excel)
- Transaction-based Service Revenue Model (Excel)
- Product-based Revenue Model (Excel)
- Sales productivity and Revenue Recognition (Excel)
Services versus Products
- Service Price List Template (MS Word)
- Service Level Agreement (MS Word)
- SLA Uptime Calculator (Excel)