Product development process templates
What does your product development process look like? It takes coordinated effort to shape a raw product idea into a valuable offering for customers. Product development describes the end-to-end process of accomplishing this — everything from strategizing and roadmapping to building and delivering a new product or enhancement to market.
Product development typically involves several teams — including product management, product marketing, and engineering as well as leadership, innovation, and operations. While most organizations follow a similar framework for product development, the details will look different depending on your business model, product type, and team structure.
Simply put — product development is complex with many moving parts. Mapping out your high-level process is a valuable exercise to help your product development team get organized and aligned on what happens during each stage. And product development templates can help you visualize how everything fits together.
Streamline product development with Aha! software — sign up for a free trial.
Below are five templates you can use to sketch out the stages of your product development process. These templates are designed for a standard process that most organizations cycle through, but you can always customize them to your company's needs. For instance, at Aha! we include more stages in our lifecycle.
With that in mind, download these PDF or PowerPoint templates to get started:
Product development overview template
Use this basic template to list your product development stages in a circular format. You can also include a basic description for each stage. This template is useful for giving everyone a high-level overview of the process.
While it can be helpful to visualize the stages in a linear or circular flow, product development is not truly a step-by-step process. The work of product building is cross-functional and highly interrelated. Rather than completing each stage before moving on to the next, it is more likely that your company will have multiple stages in motion at once.
Detailed product development template
This template displays the same stages as the one above but in a linear format with a few added pieces of information. Use this template to include extra details like the important action items for each stage.
Product development process flow diagram
Try a process flow diagram to show important steps in key product team workflows. The example below is a whiteboard template available in Aha! software. It outlines how a customer interacts with your product, but this format can be adapted to document when and how decisions are made across a variety of internal processes.
Product development team chart
Any product development process will involve cross-functional collaboration. This template will help you capture which functions make up your core product development team — making it easier to visualize which groups need to work together.
The template is populated with the functions that are commonly represented on formal product development teams.
Product development team process template
With your product development team assembled, this template will help you visualize where everyone's contributions fit into the overall process. You can see which functions are involved in each stage — serving as a helpful visual reference for internal and external stakeholders.
Try these product development templates to help document your process. Once your team is on-board with the high-level view, that is when you can go deeper into planning, build out detailed workflows, and bring your product idea to life.
