5 product development process templates for product teams
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.
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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.
