tools and templates

This section has a variety of templates, examples and starter kits. All are free. As with most templates, what you put in is much more valuable than the initial document.

  • Prioritizing for Profit
    Product managers (and product owners) prioritize their backlogs a lot of different ways. If they don’t keep an eye on business value and revenue, however, PMs can let their products drift away from meeting overall corporate goals...
  • agile use case template
    Use cases are an important part of the agile development process: each defines one specific activity or process from the user’s point of view. (Users can also be other systems or consumers of your product’s output.) Here’s a simple use case template that you can clone for each activity or interaction
  • SaaS “chefs and grocers” presentation
    The original version of this presentation was given as an April 2007 talk for SVPMA describing the difficult shift from licensed software to hosted services (software-as-a-service). It relentlessly analogized as chefs versus grocers...
  • revenue templates by pricing model
    Every revenue model is different, and experienced revenue/pricing analysts usually start with a clean spreadsheet. For those who have only done this a few times (or never), it’s handy to have some starter kits. The revenue model you build depends strongly on your pricing model...
  • service level agreement (SLA) templates
    Here are templates related to SLAs (service level agreements). One is a summary format, showing what various items or metrics might be for your service. SLA template The second is a contract addendum, for inclusion with more formal documents. SLA contract addendum The last is a simple spreadsheet calculating what it really means to have 99% uptime, 99.9% uptime, etc. uptime calculator
  • whole product bill of materials
    “Whole Product” planning targets the broad customer experience. Typically, we miss parts of our products (services) that are outside the core software, so this checklist is designed to prompt thinking about the broader customer experience. Some parts will apply to your situation and others will not...
  • sample non-disclosure and beta agreements
    sample non-disclosure agreement You should always have standard NDAs reviewed and approved by your Legal staff, but these two samples can give you a flavor. The one way NDA is for when you are sharing confidential information but not getting information back from the other party; mutual NDAs are for reciprocal disclosures...