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.
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.
Product / Market Fit Canvas Template
Works best for:
Market Research, Strategic Planning, Product Management
The product/market fit canvas template is used to help product teams meet customer and market needs with their product design. This template looks at a product in two dimensions: first, how the product fits user needs, and second, how the fully designed product fits within the market landscape. This combined metric understands a product holistically from the way customers use and desire a product, to the market demand. By comparing customer and product qualities side by side, users should better understand their product space and key metrics.
Fibonacci Scale Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Prioritization, Agile Workflows
When you manage a team, you often have to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take to complete. Try what often works for Agile teams all over the world: Turn to the Fibonacci Scale for guidance. Based on the Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the summation of the two previous numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.), this template can help you build timelines like a champ—by helping make sure that work is distributed evenly and that everyone is accurate when estimating the work and time involved in a project.
Product Vision
Works best for:
Product Management, Planning
The Product Vision template helps articulate a clear and compelling vision for product development. By defining goals, target markets, and success metrics, this template aligns teams around a shared vision. With sections for outlining product features, benefits, and competitive advantages, it communicates the value proposition effectively. This template serves as a guiding light for product teams, inspiring creativity and focus as they work towards bringing the product vision to life and achieving business objectives.
Customer Touchpoint Map Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management, Mapping
To attract and keep loyal customers, you have to truly start to understand them—their pain point, wants, and needs. A customer touchpoint map helps you gain that understanding by visualizing the path your customers follow, from signing up for a service, to using your site, to buying your product. And because no two customers are exactly alike, a CJM lets you plot out multiple pathways through your product. Soon you’ll be able to anticipate those pathways and satisfy your customers at every step.
Kano Model Template
Works best for:
Desk Research, Product Management, Prioritization
When it comes down to it, a product’s success is determined by the features it offers and the satisfaction it gives to customers. So which features matter most? The Kano model will help you decide. It’s a simple, powerful method for helping you prioritize all your features — by comparing how much satisfaction a feature will deliver to what it will cost to implement. This template lets you easily create a standard Kano model, with two axes (satisfaction and functionality) creating a quadrant with four values: attractive, performance, indifferent, and must-be.
BPM
Works best for:
Diagramming
The BPM (Business Process Management) template is a visual tool for modeling, analyzing, and optimizing business processes. It provides a structured framework for documenting process flows, identifying bottlenecks, and improving efficiency. This template enables organizations to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and drive business performance. By promoting process transparency and agility, the BPM template empowers teams to achieve operational excellence and deliver value to stakeholders.