Top 5 Notion Templates For Product Managers
Notion.so is an amazing productivity tool and I love how powerful the templates can be. So here are some awesome templates you can leverage to be a more productive PM!
If you’re a productivity enthusiast, I’m sure you must have heard of Notion by now. They have been diligently working on building a fantastic all-in-one workspace for years and they’re finally getting the recognition they deserve. Notion got on my radar last year, and ever since I first used it, I’ve introduced many friends to the wonders of Notion, helping them transition to using Notion as their primary knowledge-base and collaboration tool.
My fellow product managers love Notion because of its versatility and how great it is at removing unnecessary clutter and chaos from team collaboration.
Earlier this year, Notion released their Template Gallery, which features many awesome templates shared by both the Notion team as well as generous Notion users. I love it and have found many awesome templates for personal and team productivity. Let’s take a look at 5 of these templates that can help product managers do their job better!
Roadmap
Alright, let’s start by talking about a high-level document for a product manager, the product roadmap. The product roadmap is considered one of the most important documents for the product team.
A product roadmap is a high-level visual summary that maps out the vision and direction of your product offering over time. — ProductPlan
The interesting thing about product roadmaps is that they can be divided on the basis of multiple different classifications. The product roadmap is a document that serves a different purpose for each type of stakeholder. The engineers need granular roadmaps that focus more on the current and near-term sprints. Their roadmaps are broken down to the epic and feature level. Meanwhile, the executives and investors don’t care about specific features or user stories. They are interested in the higher level strategic concepts that drive business. Similarly, there are different themes and milestones for roadmaps built for sales people and customers.
How can Notion help?
The best part about Notion is the variety of views available to the user. You can nest pages inside pages, fully customizable with tables, Kanban boards, lists, and more. This means that a single roadmap document can be used by your team to view high-level and low-level components.
Here is an awesome product roadmap template you can use in Notion.
Meeting Notes
Product managers are busy bees. A big chunk of their time is spent in meetings, be it with team members or external stakeholders. Internal meetings like daily standups and weekly sync happen fairly often and it’s easy to lose track of what is discussed. More and more teams are going remote lately, and that’s only going to escalate in the coming years. This means that keeping track of meetings becomes even more important, because not all team members will be able to attend every time.
How can Notion help?
You can use Notion to write down meeting notes after/during every meeting and keep them all in one accessible place. You can also add tags to them so they’re easy to look up. Other custom fields can also be added like when the meeting took place and who all attended.
This template created by the good folks at Notion is pretty great to help you get started with meeting notes.
User Research
User research is another important part of the PM’s job. It is the PM’s responsibility to create different user personas and talk to customers fitting those user personas to determine which themes and features need to be prioritized. Product managers need to follow and foster a decision-making process that is evidence-based, so user research proves to be incredibly useful to them.
How can Notion help?
With Notion, you can manage all your upcoming meetings scheduled with the customers in one document. Not only this, you can also assign the meetings to different members in your team if needed, and create separate pages for each person so you can jot down pre-interview preparation notes and their feedback post-interview in an easily accessible place.
Check out this awesome Notion template to take your user research game to the next level.
Tip: If you’re already a Notion user and logged into your account, just click on the ‘Duplicate’ button on the top right corner of any template and copy it to your own workspace.
Sprint Retro
In agile development, conducting retrospective meetings is an essential part of the process. Things don’t always go as planned, and agile development takes this in stride. That’s why sprint retros exist. They let you openly discuss the successes and failures of a sprint. This way, you can move forward with important lessons and apply them to subsequent sprints to avoid the same traps and failures.
How can Notion help?
With Notion, you can easily create a document for each sprint retro with sections for important topics of discussion. You can check out a fairly simple yet well thought-out Notion template for conducting a sprint retrospective here. It’s built on the traditional methodology and includes sections like:
- What went right?
- What went wrong?
- What did we learn?
- Next actions
Team members can show their agreement to a statement by voting in its favor (increase the vote counter by one point). If your team conducts retros in a different manner and includes other topics of discussion in the meeting, you can simply add new sections to this template.
Product Wiki
Lastly, let’s talk about the most important and most powerful Notion template for PMs. You can use this to boost not only your own productivity but your team’s productivity as well. I’m talking about a product wiki!
A product wiki is a space where you can keep track of all the documents shared across your team. I’ve tried a number of tools over the years to maintain a product wiki, and I’m sure many of you must have done the same. It can get frustrating when your documents are scattered across five different platforms. It’s inefficient and wastes time. Not only that, onboarding new members to your team becomes slow and painful as you have to invite and help them find their way around each workplace separately.
How can Notion help?
Like I said before, you can have many different types of documents and document views in Notion. As a PM, you can leverage this to create a better, more efficient collaboration space for your team. The dream of keeping everything together in one common space no longer remains a dream. You can keep a record of all things related to your product in your Notion product wiki, whether it be design specs, processes, best practices, tasks, deadlines, OKRs, or anything else. Your team members can easily find, contribute to, and comment on these documents. This helps maintain one single source of knowledge for the whole team.
Find a great Notion template to create your own product wiki here. As with everything else, you can add or remove whatever new kind of document you use with your product team.
Bonus
In small teams, product managers often wear multiple hats and have auxiliary responsibilities appended to their role that ensure the smooth functioning of the team. I know several PMs like this and I’m myself in a similar position. So here are some great templates for those of us who want to squeeze that extra bit of productivity out of Notion.
Engineering
For those who are much more directly involved in the product’s development process. They often take the role of a scrum master as well as the product owner.
Design
For PMs who are more involved in the design process and work closely with the designers.
Marketing
For PMs who are also responsible for managing the product’s brand and what message is being put out about their product.
Being a product manager is a lot of work. You have to manage dozens of moving parts as well as the expectations of a lot of people. I believe as PMs, we should try to secure every possible advantage. Find the tools that give you an edge. Notion is one such tool.
And speaking of that, if you’re looking for a kickass product team to build your product, look no further. At Skynox Tech, my team and I love turning people’s product visions into reality and build products that delight users. We also work on a lot of cool, open-source tools!
