Create an Effective Shopping Receipt Template for Product Management

Shopping receipt template for Product Management

hi everyone welcome to this hands-on session where we're going to be talking all about product management templates we've got some really fantastic guests joining us here today to show us how to work all these awesome templates first of all we have evan who is the head of marketing partnerships and solutions at coda evan thanks so much for joining us thanks for having me super excited to be here and we also have rosalind senior director of platformer product at mural thanks alan glad to be here and finally well not finally last but not least we have ben head of community at notion ben thanks for joining thanks for having me so we're here to talk about templates and templates of course as we all know are used by uh hundreds of thousands of product managers all across the world everyone in our product community comes from a different background they all have different skills some of them have used some of the deliverables uh that they need on a weekly even a daily basis in product before and others haven't that's why we love templates because all of everyone in our community comes to us and they're always saying i need this like how do i make a road map how do i prioritize having a set of templates to be able to hand them it helps to level the playing field it helps everyone jump in and have a head start so super excited to talk about them um and collaborating with you guys was an absolute no-brainer for us but rosalind maybe you can tell us how does mural come up with all of these templates uh sure i mean there's a few different sources for templates on our side first one is customer feedback you know we look at what are different customers using mural for we saw that there was there was a lot of teams using mural for agile planning um in in one example so we kind of doubled down on our uh jiren integration released to jr cloud integration this summer um to kind of you know address what looks like a pretty um high demand area um and we saw that you know this the previous version had just been one way like you could export into jira we introduced this um two-way integration um based on what we're seeing people do along with templates on how to use it so we were seeing you know sort of building on top of existing usage to support um you know easier use and some best practices built into the templates and we saw with that sort of combination of integration and template like a 10x increase within you know a couple of weeks of launching it which in product management shipping a feature and getting a 10x increase uh you know in a couple of weeks and usage is like is a pretty big win so um that was a great example for us how we like to ship those two things together um there's a community forum um where our members discuss templates that they would like share templates that they've made um we had a lot of requests for example for retrospective templates that's the most used template in mural we added a few creative ones people piled on and started adding their own so there's a little dynamic engagement there um and then third is partnering on best practices with experts so you know here we are we partner with product school on product management templates we partner with c prime on agile process templates and then sometimes we partner with customers we have a couple examples for example we did an okr planning template that we actually built with spotify and then shared out broadly um in a store storyboarding template um that we built with facebook and then they were you know generous enough to let us share that out generally as well fantastic um and ben maybe you can tell us what are some of the tips for finding and using templates in notion yeah for sure um so i think with with with templates and notion um what's really cool is is our community creates a lot of really powerful templates of all kinds um and you can you can find them um pretty much all over the place you can you can go to notion.so community and and see some of the different forums where where all these folks are creating templates um we we have there's a there's a subreddit there's facebook groups um all kinds of places where notion users hang out and and meet each other um and you can you can really find any any type of template you're looking for and we we we also curate some of these templates in our template gallery um which you could find that no notion data templates um and we have them kind of categorized by um different verticals and uh use cases um so we also we also have templates that we've made in our app picker in our template picker so in in in the notion app if you click on um templates within the within the product you'll see kind of um a lot of the uh templates that we've made for marketing sales support product design really whatever whatever you're looking for and those are really good um kind of standard templates for when you're getting started but i think as soon as you're trying to kind of find um very advanced uh and kind of sophisticated templates from from different use cases the community is really where you can you can find a lot of that it's amazing how community driven so much of the effort is behind creating templates it's so cool to see people taking these tours and creating these these libraries um and while speaking of libraries evan i know that coda you've made a big investment in templates i mean you've got your public gallery and you really focus on helping users create their own templates in your opinion why are templates so important to product teams and how can people get started with them encoder yeah it's it's a great question i mean i think um for people who are unfamiliar code is an all-in-one doc focused on teams um and and the promise is that we can bring together the best of docs spreadsheets applications so people anyone can make a dock as powerful as an app um and one of the things that we've explored for a long time is is kind of the idea of templated process and making a product out of process with with the tools that you have i think you know templates historically for a lot of different companies have represented you know an easy way of getting started with a tool they've represented you know some inspiration about the use cases that you can go solve and for us we've taken it a step further to say it's actually a place where you can document define your rituals as a team um actually carlos from product school spoke at our recent block party conference and talked about uh invited a panel of folks to reflect on their rituals for meetings we talked about rituals for product teams um are we really taking a step further to actually make it a core part of our product experience in a couple of different ways and actually uh do you mind if i share my screen no go ahead exciting um yeah so i i think first and foremost um can you see my screen and i'll cut back we'll cut that out don't worry we can see it um first and foremost from the very beginning uh we created this gallery experience where anybody could kind of publish uh their their best ideas or their use cases of coda to the world um we actually it started as something that we hosted and we kind of published to ourselves sharing best practices from what we've seen from our user base um but we've actually launched a publishing platform uh that allows anybody to kind of publish to this to this marketplace and share their ideas and i think a lot of cases this is you know people trying to both build an audience but also share kind of how they work and and share kind of companion pieces to the way that they um uh to to other kind of content they've produced for example i mean recently john zaratsky from google ventures launched this uh five-day design sprint dock which actually um is kind of a companion to a book that he wrote about the idea of how do you run design sprints with your team and it's just an actionable way of going and kind of taking a product idea into an mvp and this doc allows you to kind of walk through that content but then also put it into practice um kind of define the sprint and then run it right from a single place and we've developed a bunch of uh templates as well similar to this taking insights we've discussed with product school and things we've heard from the community and turning them into um to implementations that people could go pick up and start using but just to kind of center around why philosophically we care about this we we have started talking about this idea of rituals and teams and and how you know how somebody does the work is almost as important as the work itself it's kind of the uniqueness of a team represented in the in the way that they get things done is what makes their products unique and exciting um we've taken this quote from bing gordon really to heart as we've defined these experiences you know companies have these rituals they're named every employee knows them by their first friday and they are templated uh which is kind of the key part of this discussion and so when we think about templates in the product um this is coda right here you know we've even embedded this experience directly inside of coda so when you're in the doc experience we have this actually in doc gallery where you can kind of pull in even small repeatable processes that you might want to um to engage with regularly with your team and so one very good example of this that we've talked about previously in product school is the uh is kind of the product requirements document the ability for you to kind of take a problem statement a target audience and start framing up a product you want to develop um and in this template you can you know pull this in to your to your dock and then you can kind of see that there's these pre-defined areas where you can fill out your audience your problem overview goals success non-goals things like that and you can even go into kind of creating a log of decisions that have happened in the past so that people can reference back to this over time and use this as kind of a you know long-standing asset and history for this product but one of the things that becomes super interesting for us when you think about templates is not just the like i'm writing a product spec every time i create a new product but you have these review sessions and forums where you're going to go discuss this product spec and try to get alignment from your team and you're going to try to you know make sure that people are on the same page about what you're defining here and so you know when you hit slash encoder you actually have access to not just the building blocks for a product but also the templates that are most commonly used either defined by your org or things that we've launched centrally that are out in a kind of public gallery and so you can do things like when you're in a meeting and you want to know if people have read the content and actually absorbed it you can type done reading button and this basically will drop in uh a set of our building blocks some text and then this reaction which we'll just mark when i'm done reading uh it puts my headshot in here it also counts the number of people who have read it so i can see if there are 15 people in this meeting and there are 15 people who have selected this i know that we've gotten to the point where we've uh we've got um everyone through the content similarly a common common ritual for us inside of things like product requirements reviews is the concept of a dory and a pulse and the idea here is that you want to be able to quickly capture both the sentiment of of people in the room about how they feel about what they've uh just absorbed and what they've read and you want to do it in a way that doesn't kind of bias the conversation and so you can it inserts one of coda's core building blocks which is tables um allows us to kind of fill in how we feel this is great and then you can kind of also reveal all of the different sentiments from your team similarly we use a similar a process for capturing topics for discussion using this uh concept called dory which is a reference to finding nemo the fish that asks all the questions um but essentially a similar uh bit here where you can have people add a bunch of ideas or topics up vote down vote have kind of an unbiased process for um for getting the biggest topics out in the open and so just to kind of step this all the way back i think templates for us are you know representative rituals both large and small inside of organizations and we've created these both gallery experiences and these in-product experiences to try to make sure that they're um can be well defined and repeated over and over again inside of teams okay awesome thank you so much um that was uh really interesting i'm sure i'm not the only one who feels like going into their coda and playing around with all of that um so um roslyn a question for you now uh one of the most important skills in product management is deciding whether you should build a product or a feature in the first place we all know the companies who go after that golden feature and then they end up having to kill it a few months later going oops that wasn't the right decision to make so how does mural help ensure that the product managers not only have access to the best market analysis frameworks but are successful in how they use them sure um it's really our focus on making facilitators successful by facilitator i mean whoever's running the meeting so in this case it's gonna be the product manager most likely um and we build success right into the template um and combine it with some facilitator specific features that we call facilitator superpowers um that you can use and are called out in the template um i would love to show you one of those templates right now and give you a walkthrough so you can see an example yeah please do all right make sure i've got the right one here [Music] and here [Music] footnote if you don't have a mural account that's no problem it's free now um for forever so you can go make yourself an account if you don't have one already um when you click on create mural you have all the templates here um so for today i wanted to show the feature feature market analysis template so you can take a little peek with the preview we can click on it and create the mural and then you have this kind of starting base to work with um and this um template you know it's designed i think for a couple of different audiences one is if you're sort of new um so it's great for new product managers maybe doing this the first time you've kind of got the idea but it's um you know it's one thing to have the framework in theory and another thing to just get walk through it another is actually i think growing teams like we have at mural where you want to have kind of common practices and make sure we're all doing things right in the same way so once you're in there um we have a couple of different ways that we're making it easy just make you look like a pro and you know look good in front of the rest of the team and your boss who like know what you look like you know what you're doing um even if you're kind of winging it so first thing is instructions on the left side this is in every template um it says exactly what's the purpose um who's at four uh what are you going to get out of it we even put difficulty and how many people should be in meeting and how long it's going to take so you're super clear on how this workshop is going to go right out of the gate um and then um we have this in every template there's a quick little primer underneath that on how to use mural which is great when you're having meetings um with other participants that haven't used it before so you can give them this like real quick primer um and people don't have to be you know figuring stuff out as they go and lastly in every one of these there's resources those are background reading um which you know those are great things to read in advance um and then potentially share out afterwards uh shout out to link you know we have product school articles in here we have coda articles on here as the partnership goes beyond a you know a little bit of content in a webinar um on the right hand side we always have also this outline so the outline is a really important feature for you as a facilitator planning a session it um first it's navigation so you can click on different parts of the outline and it will take you to different areas in the template um and if you have folks following you which you can you can summon everyone follow you or they can do it voluntarily you're kind of walking people through the experience um and the second is that it tells you exactly what to do um so it says you know literally you're gonna tell the participants to take these three by five five by three sticky notes you spend this much time on it um you do a vote for it so it's very um specific so you can focus on the content and generating the ideas and not sort of the logistics once people are in the room um so just to give you an example in this case um so dropping in some three by five stickies which was the recommendation for that section i just drop them in everyone in the room can drop them in obviously um and you know it says five minutes i've got a timer up here so i can make sure we're doing it within this you know the recommended time there's private mode we very often recommend um using private mode in a brainstorm because people aren't distracted by other ideas or mine better mind worth evan i saw you have kind of the same ideas in yours um and then um once you've got um once you've got some different ideas in here so potential customers um people not real creative on the spot then you can you know you can finish up and then have a voting session so you take you know so say three minutes we'd go to timer again and then you've got a little um you've got a voting thing here you can start a voting session there's a lot of different options here you let people choose how many to vote on um start that and then you can vote and then let's say i'm just gonna vote for fitness trainers twice because i really quite like fitness trainers um and then you'll have that result of that vote there for the duration and again back to this outline it's really then walking you through so at the end um you know you kind of can bring it all together and it will tell you like okay let's take all of the top voted items for each of these sections that we just went through drop them on our canvas um over here and you know all of a sudden we've got we've got this whole feature market campus that's got really kind of the fundamentals for making this decision about whether you've really got an opportunity in your idea here um and that's kind of the punch line and again you know i think both adam and dad mentioned community community is a big deal for us as well um we have this templates area in our community and you can see we've got new templates added all the time we've got people sharing ideas riffing off each other so you know if there's something that doesn't quite meet your needs you can come here and um and kind of find out how other people have iterated on it great thanks so much for sharing that was super helpful i have to say i love summoning people to me in a mural board i feel so powerful it's one of my favorite features um sorry that was a complete segue but just just enthusiastic so now ben in our latest batch of templates we were focusing particularly on side hustles and we wanted to share with our community the templates that can help them in their side hustle can you share how the business model canvas works in notion yeah absolutely i'll i'll go ahead and share my screen um so this is this is a template we put together for um in in this batch of templates for folks who want to be work who want to start their own side hustles um and it's it's essentially just kind of a a high-level view of like a business or idea or product you want to work on um and you can take a look and see like kind of all these different uh high level parts of of this potential business value propositions customer segments channels customer relations and you can hop into each of them um and kind of you know add and add information and just things to think about um and i think what's what's you know what's what's really powerful about notion and and and when you take a template like this is it's it's just very easy to go ahead and then kind of customize it to whatever you know however you would like to see it so if you for example don't want to see the the page content on here you'd rather see kind of a simpler version of this you can go ahead and kind of switch that off or if you want to have a different view for example like a board view uh you can go ahead and kind of set up your own view here to to see things uh by categories and now you can see kind of the everything that's related to infrastructure everything that's related to customers finances and in a very easy digestible view um so um you know this is this is one of those templates i think there's another four or five of them in in this latest batch of side hustle templates there's a couple other ones um and i think they're they're really great for folks who um who are looking for um just kind of easy easy ways to uh kind of think about uh projects or side hustles that they want to work on and i would definitely recommend checking them out and um and and seeing how they can be helpful i'll go ahead and stop sharing my screen amazing thanks so much um so i'm sure i don't need to preach to anyone here the importance of using these uh using these templates um so just to mention if you're watching this and you're interested in grabbing these templates head to productschool.com templates and you can play along with us um now evan working in product teams often means combining a number of tools and work processes how does coda enable multiple teams uh multiple tools sorry to work together with teams like engineering design marketing can you maybe show us a little something yeah absolutely i think um similar to what we chatted about earlier about teams defining their rituals i think there's a there's also a recognition that uh teams use a variety of tools to get work done and in some cases meeting them where they are is really important especially for you know fit for purpose tools like like design tools like figma or diagramming tools like miro mural software like jira and github which are used for certain parts of engineering teams and so when we think about templates it's not just about the you know the simple how do you create you know a document with consistent headings and uh or how do you create kind of a simple table that you can do the uh upvoting and downvoting and sentiment tracking but also how do you kind of bring in content from other solutions uh and push content out to other solutions so that you can kind of use coda to actually um uh manage your entire process and end as a team so i'll share my screen really quickly as well um i mentioned earlier that you can um create you can both pull templates uh inside of your dock that are uh published um either by coda or uh will eventually be published by others um but you can also create your own templates and reuse them and what what's really helpful there is that you can actually um build these templates atop a platform that we've launched called packs and what packs are um are ways of extending coda's product both to other tools but also to extend kind of the core of the product itself we launched our api a few years ago largely was focused on developers and we saw a lot of really interesting integrations built atop that um but recently at block party we actually announced uh this new evolution of pax called pax studio the idea is that you can anybody should be able to develop a pack inside of the experience of coda without having to be a developer without having their own development environment having to push code this will all happen inside of coda and we're we've opened this up in beta now and what this platform allows you to do is pull in data from other apps that lets you kind of to create these experiences inside of coda using that those apps data um so that you can have these repeatable experiences and then you can kind of create packs inside of coda for things like formulas you use very um regularly inside the platform uh and all of this can be built directly inside the browser and so if i kind of show a couple of just very simple examples here you know it's very common for product managers to work with designers to kind of go through the process of iterating on a series of mocks or designs from kind of initial wireframes all the way down to full fidelity um we at coda use figma pretty often for this process and uh one of the common things that pms will often be challenged with is how do i keep track of how close we are to completing these designs and getting them ready so that the engineering team can go take action on them and so one template we've created is this kind of figma frame uh template and this is one that can be of course extended changed and saved for future use depending on how your team works um but basically within within the template um experience you can drag and drop it in and what this does is it actually integrates with sigma so that when you drop a specific figma frame into uh this row it will actually pull back all of the details from figma on that frame including the url including the image of the of the frame so you can actually see what remind yourself what what exists that figma you can even render out all the individual comments that people are layering into that and so what this allows me to do is just very simply in coda i can add two columns one which is just a status are we in review on this is this something that's in the backlog and kind of a simple button that marks it done um and this just allows me to have a single place tied to where my product spec is my roadmap is my kind of uh my marketing plans and see kind of where we are in terms of the approval flow for for our designs um similarly one thing we commonly do is when we've gone through a full development cycle and we're looking at product features and trying to figure out how things worked i'm doing kind of a retrospective with a variety of teams inside the product which you know typically is a combination of long-form thought and also reflecting on okay here's all the stuff we built you know how long did it take what was kind of the t-shirt size we set up up front and what did it actually end up being and so in this template you have kind of an ability to just add any text you want format it however you want and then we've also synchronized our jira issues directly from jira and this is updated we can sync it immediately and pull in all the latest data you can refresh it on a regular basis and so we can use this as kind of a reflection place without having to leave coda and go to another product and then we can do what we did earlier which is i can add my little sentiment tracker here and be like okay well how do we feel about this these sets of features we were working on and the speed at which we did this and you can kind of again tailor this to your specific process um we've also seen people use a lot of communication tools attached to coda and so you know inside of packs as an example we have integrated with tools like gmail and slack and and dozens of others and this will only grow as our community gets more involved um but you can do things like create a button that sends a message so that for example when i hit this button to mark this done it then sends a slack message to the product channel and says we've completed the review on this feature it's ready for development and so those simple workflows that usually mean copy pasting from here into another place or having to open a bunch of different tabs are now consolidated into one one place and if folks want to join the beta and get involved coded io slash pax beta is where we're starting to to get folks signed up and and interested in that product we'll share more detail fantastic thanks so much for sharing uh so one of the reasons why we at product school love uh collaboration tools like coda mural and notion so much it's not just how well they filled the need for collaboration once the world moved online it's actually how much better and how much easier they're making a product manager's life even when we move back to the office we're seeing companies list these tools in their job requirements saying we need people who know how to use these tools to fill these positions so that's why we love you guys so much and we're so happy to be collaborating with you on these templates so i would love to show everyone uh everyone who's joining us where you can get your hands on these templates that's how you can get here but if you search product school templates we're probably near the top um so this is our main hub for all of our templates all you have to do to get your hands on them is to pop your email address in here and hit send me the templates and they should come straight to your inbox um if for some reason they don't um feel free to get in touch with anyone at product school and we'll help you out with that so at the top right here we have our side hustle templates we we're really strong believers in the art of having a side hustle if you're an aspiring product manager it can help you gain that product management experience before you've even been hired if you're already a product manager it's a way for you to sort of flex your peer muscles on something you're really passionate about outside of your day job uh and you never know maybe it'll become the next big thing it could be your very own startup we just think they're the bee's knees um and then if you keep scrolling you'll get to product management essentials these aren't just great for aspiring product managers who are looking to learn the ropes they're also really really helpful for product managers of all levels who just need something to plug in and play maybe you've been doing things the same way for a long time and you want to freshen things up a little bit this is the place to come so that it brings us quite nicely to the end of our session i want to thank mural coda and notion for collaborating with us on these templates and you three for joining me today thanks so much thanks alan thanks for having us thank you hey bye everyone i hope you found it all very helpful [Music] you