Feature Canvas Template
Analyse incoming features and ideas keeping in mind users, problems and context.
About the Feature Canvas Template
A feature canvas helps you understand why a new feature was requested.
Before you dive into solution mode and build out a feature, try filling in a feature canvas. The grid layout helps you understand if investing time in a new feature will be valuable to your customers, meet business needs, and make the most of team resources.
Your product team may want to fill in a feature canvas after completing a product canvas. After developing expertise in who your customers are and what your product’s basic functionality should be, it’s time to dig deeper.
Feature canvases allow your team to build context and value propositions for feature requests. You'll make better product decisions by learning more about the risks and opportunities of some advanced features.
What is a feature canvas
Before you start working on a concrete solution for a new feature, you need to figure out the “why” that’s motivating it. A feature canvas helps you understand if you should commit to a new feature based on its feasibility and whether it truly solves customer pain points.
A feature canvas typically has seven segments:
An idea description: How would you describe the product feature in 2-3 sentences?
Why: How would implementing this product feature help your customers and your organization?
Contextual situations: When do people need this feature? How do internal and external factors impact how they interact with the feature?
Problems to solve: What are the customer and business problems this feature addresses?
The value proposition: What value will you deliver to your customers? Revisit a relevant methodology like a lean canvas or business model canvas to help craft a definition. Using lean canvas templates can provide a structured and repeatable approach to clearly articulate and refine your value proposition.
Team capabilities: What resources are immediately available to you to help build new solutions to these problems?
Restrictions and limitations: What obstacles could stop your team from building these features right away?
By considering these different factors, you can decide what feature requests are worth building, and which ones aren’t worth following through. This is the basic version of a feature canvas, which can be adapted for any product feature idea.
When to use a feature canvas
You can use a feature canvas during planning or brainstorming sessions to sell your ideas or align your cross-functional teams on all the details. It can help you and your product team:
Spend more time defining a problem before you commit to building a new solution
Stay user-centered while analyzing new feature requests and ideas
Discard feature ideas that don’t fit current needs, user contexts, or business goals
Find blind spots to address in your user research before building new features
Align teams around the context you need to agree on before you commit to building a feature
You can also use this canvas to plan feature launch activities. These can include re-engaging dissatisfied customers, boosting customer retention and customer loyalty, and campaigns reminding your customers that your company is listening and considering feedback.
How to use the feature canvas template
Get started by selecting the feature canvas template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.
Give your team context about why you’re using the feature canvas. This canvas aims to help your team progress from execution mode to analysis mode. Context, customer problems, capabilities, and restrictions all impact whether or how you build out features. Get your product team to fill in this feature canvas in a single session, to understand the reasons for prioritizing certain features over others.
Fill in each numbered segment with sticky notes. Stick to one idea per sticky note. After placing all the notes, nominate a group facilitator to review them to determine what ideas to prioritize, and which to set aside for the near future. Spend 10 minutes on this, then assess whether you’re ready to move onto the next step. If not, try another five minutes.
Add other segments if needed. An extended feature canvas can have up to 14 segments, including: customer tasks, customer awareness, customer support needs, success criteria, and key activities to deliver customer and business value.
Invite cross-functional team members to review and contribute to your canvas. You can use this feature canvas as a one-off team synchronization tool or maintain it as a living document throughout a product’s life cycle – to implementation and beyond. Revisit it as necessary to update details or add more segments as your team’s analysis and planning needs evolve.
Get started with this template right now.
Voice of the Customer Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, User Experience
Identifying the voice of the customer is a crucial part of any customer experience strategy. Your Voice of Customer is simply a framework for understanding your customers’ needs, wants, preferences, and expectations as they interact with your brand. Evaluating your Voice of Customer allows you to dive into what your customers are thinking, feeling, and saying about your products and services, so you can build a better customer journey. Use the Voice of Customer template to record answers to key questions about your customer, including: What are they saying about our product? What do they need? How can we fulfill that need? And who is this persona?
Remote Design Sprint Template
Works best for:
Design, Desk Research, Sprint Planning
A design sprint is an intensive process of designing, iterating, and testing a prototype over a 4 or 5 day period. Design sprints are conducted to break out of stal, work processes, find a fresh perspective, identify problems in a unique way, and rapidly develop solutions. Developed by Google, design sprints were created to enable teams to align on a specific problem, generate multiple solutions, create and test prototypes, and get feedback from users in a short period of time. This template was originally created by JustMad, a business-driven design consultancy, and has been leveraged by distributed teams worldwide.
Product Feature Presentation
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Product Feature Presentation template aids product teams in showcasing product features and benefits effectively. By providing a structured framework for presenting key features, use cases, and value propositions, this template enables teams to communicate product functionality clearly and persuasively. With sections for creating feature demos, customer testimonials, and competitive differentiators, it facilitates engaging presentations that resonate with target audiences. This template serves as a powerful tool for driving product adoption and generating customer interest.
Lean UX Canvas Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management, User Experience
What are you building, why are building it, and who are you building it for? Those are the big pictures questions that guide great companies and teams toward success — and Lean UX helps you find the answers. Especially helpful during project research, design, and planning, this tool lets you quickly make product improvements and solve business problems, leading to a more customer-centric product. This template will let you create a Lean UX canvas structured around eight key elements: Business problem, Business outcome, Users and customers, User benefits, Solution ideas, Hypothesis, Assumptions, Experimentation.
Research Topic Brainstorm Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Brainstorming, Ideation
Coming up with a topic for a research project can be a daunting task. Use the Research Topic Brainstorm template to take a general idea and transform it into something concrete. With the Research Topic Brainstorm template, you can compile a list of general ideas that interest you and then break them into component parts. You can then turn those parts into questions that might be the focus for a research project.
Growth Experiments Template
Works best for:
Leadership, Desk Research, Strategic Planning
Many ambitious companies are eying the future and aiming to grow. But growth decisions can be leaps of faith that are risky and costly. That’s why growth experiments make so much sense. They offer a systematic six-step method that reveals which strategies are most effective, how they’ll affect your revenue, and how they compare to your past approaches. By helping you test out your strategies for scaling your business before you fully commit, growth experiments can save you serious time, resources, and money.