Product Canvas

Product Canvas Template

What is the most important thing for teams working on complicated tasks? Skills? Ideas? Budget? Well, all those are definitely important and define the final result. But they are not as important as healthy communication and understanding that you all are on the same page.

Product Canvas is a tool that helps teams to collaboratively determine and communicate the product vision and strategy they are about to pursue. Comprehensive Product Canvas also helps to communicate with your client or stakeholders.

Bringing together various aspects of a product, Product Canvas serves as a very specific knowledge base for a certain project where everyone may seek quick answers whenever they are in doubt.

A Product Canvas was developed to ease your team’s job. Structuring, gathering info, and determining the main points may take a lot of time. Imagine how far you will go using a Product Canvas template. It shortens the process significantly, leaving you responsible only for filling in all your data and reviewing it occasionally.

xTiles offers you a ready-to-use and free Product Canvas template that you can freely share with your colleagues and everyone who needs or wants to see it. We made it flexible and adaptive to the specific needs of different products and teams.

What is a Product Canvas?

A Product Canvas is well-known to be a first-step tool in defining a future project. Combining conciseness and informativeness, it defines what your project is, what it will/may become, and what strategy you need to develop and implement to succeed.

Product managers use Product Canvas to start the process that will lead to creating a product with incredible user experience and useful features. If we measure this tool from a management perspective, it unites Agile and UX by combining user stories with UX artifacts such as design sketches, scenarios, personas, etc.

A Product Canvas allows you to sell your future product to clients and investors with a single image, a single document. It also serves as a tool for communicating within big organizations or teams. 

When do I need a Product Canvas?

As a rule, a Product Canvas template is usually used during product development's early stages to align team members and facilitate discussions with stakeholders. However, we don’t always follow the rules, and the impulse to start may be so powerful that you rush into action without mapping out what needs to be done.

That’s why a Product Canvas will be useful at various stages of your product development: from the initial idea to the launch and beyond.

1. You may use the Product Canvas template for idea generation.

When you have a raw idea, don’t exactly know what you want to create, and are unsure what results you want to get, give a go to the Product Canvas Template. It will help you organize your thoughts and communicate your vision to others.

2. You may use the Product Canvas template for planning.

When your idea is polished and well-defined, you start planning. There will be a lot of decisions at this stage and a lot of discussions. You need a plan that will work and keep a team aligned and motivated to do their best work. 

That’s why, when planning your product development, you may get many benefits from using Product Canvas. It will help to determine the key features, your target audience, your value proposition, and the metrics you will need to measure your success.

3. You may use the Product Canvas template to align everyone involved around a shared vision.

When you work on a product, there are many sides interested in the successful outcome. Everyone may have a different purpose for participating in a project, but everyone involved must be united around a shared vision.

A Product Canvas template will help you ensure that everyone understands the product’s purpose, goals, and deliverables.

4. You may use the Product Canvas template to prioritize tasks.

Prioritizing is one of the key secrets of successful and on-time product delivery. You can’t manage everything at once, and even if it seems that this incredibly harsh race will lead you to a perfectly finished product, you’re likely to discover new points to work on after its completion and launch. But everyone might be too devastated to go on.

A Product Canvas template will help you define what is the most important, what is less important, and what only seems to be important regarding your product goals and purpose.

5. You may use the Product Canvas template to communicate.

It is said that we can’t understand someone until we’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Sharing and discussing Product Canvas with your team will work even better. 

Suppose there are no words to express your ideas or concepts. You may use pictures, memes, or songs to give your team the needed vibe and information. Online templates give you more space to be inventive in communicating your ideas and visions.

As you can see, Product Canvas serves many purposes for starting a project, processing it, finishing it, and reviewing it for further improvements.

How to create a Product Canvas?

Creating a Product Canvas is much easier than fixing a mess after you’ve started doing something without a clearly defined and discussed idea. We have a quick guide for creating your own document so that you can start working on your product development asap.

Remember that the xTiles Product Canvas Template is flexible and adaptable to your product’s or your vision of the product's specific needs and features. You’re free to add or remove sections in order to adjust the template document.

Create a Product Canvas for your project using the xTiles template and the next steps:

1. What is your product name? Do you have one already? Will it have some hidden meaning? Will it refer to the problem your product solves? Naming is very important for the rest of your product's cohesiveness. 

It should be easy to remember, maybe a bit “sticky” so that people keep repeating that word or collocation in their minds without realizing it. That is one of the basic rules for naming a product.

You may have the name when you start making your Product Canvas. However, if you still haven’t come up with something nice and suitable, try brainstorming with your team.

2. Now you need to define the business goals of your product. What key goals should it achieve? It may be revenue growth, market share, customer retention, etc. If you already have a product roadmap, this step won’t take more than a minute.

While defining your main goals, remember that every product is unique, so copying your competitors’ goals is sometimes not the best option, as it might lead you in the wrong direction.

3. Next, you will need to set the key metrics. These metrics will help you understand whether you’ve reached your goal or not. It may be metrics such as user engagement, conversion rates, revenue, etc.

It’s crucial to make them realistic. Many teams prefer to challenge themselves by setting metric numbers that are too high or impossible to reach with the current level of their skills, budget, etc. However, such an approach rather leads to losing all motivation.

4. The next step is identifying your product's target audience. For whom do you work? Who do you want to help or satisfy?

Defining what problem your product is about to resolve is the first stage of knowing your target customers. Usually, it’s an ongoing process that needs continuous research to stay up-to-date with the changing market trends and user behaviors.

5. We’re almost done. Now, you need to plan what your finished product will look like and what it will bring you in the long term. It will help to check the data you’ve just written down.

All points of your Product Canvas should be aligned with each other. Otherwise, your team might be misled with no defined plan of where to move.

6. Finally, you will need to define the next steps you will take to start implementing everything you’ve just discussed and identified. That point will evolve into your action plan, keeping the connection with the Product Canvas.

Once you have created your Product Canvas, share it with everyone involved to get feedback. It may happen that after their review, you will need to refine it or change some parts of it. When the document is validated, use it to your advantage. Let it not lie somewhere forgotten.

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