My favorite product management templates

This edition of Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter answers a reader question by curating his favorite product management templates and frameworks in one place. The collection spans 1-pagers and PRDs, business and team strategy, product vision, go-to-market plans, and general planning tools like roadmaps and performance reviews. Many entries were crowdsourced from Twitter and each is annotated with a short note on what makes it useful, such as clear non-goals, success criteria, or a compact problem statement. The post also lists several decision-making and thinking frameworks and ends with job listings and reading recommendations. It matters because it gives product teams a ready-made starting kit for documenting work, aligning on strategy, and launching, rather than inventing these artifacts from scratch.

01Key takeaways

• Start projects with a one-page document so the problem, goals, and scope are clear before detailed work begins.
• Include explicit non-goals in requirement documents to prevent scope creep and align stakeholders early.
• Define success criteria and risks up front so progress and tradeoffs can be judged objectively.
• Use a product vision and positioning framework to connect customer needs with the team's direction.
• Keep strategy and launch plans as reusable templates so each new initiative starts from a proven structure.
• Adopt a documented decision-making framework to make choices faster and more transparent across the team.

02Key sections

1-pagers and PRDs

A set of templates from well-known companies and practitioners for scoping projects in a single document. Several notes highlight sections worth borrowing, like non-goals, risks, and summary-first layouts.

Strategy and vision

Templates for business and team strategy, plus vision tools such as positioning frameworks, ladders of needs, and vision FAQs. These help teams articulate where they are headed and why.

Go-to-market

Launch, marketing, and GTM plan templates that structure how a product reaches customers after it is built.

Other operational templates

Practical planning artifacts including a roadmap, a performance review format, and a planning timeline for organizing work and people.

Decision-making and thinking frameworks

Mental models for making decisions, structuring arguments, framing problems, and understanding jobs to be done, drawn from companies and writers in the field.

03From the post

“Hello and welcome to thefree monthly editionof my weekly newsletter. I’m Lenny, and each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office. Q: I’ve seen you share a few PM templates in the past. Do you have a place to find all of your favorite templates? Now I do! Below are all of my favorite templates and frameworks that I rely on. As a bonus, I asked the wonderful people of Twitter to share their favorites, from which I picked my favorites and included. Enjoy! ✍️ 1-pagers/PRDs 1. My personal 1-pager template—How I start every project 2. Kevin Yien’s PRD template (PM at Square)—Love this whole template, particularly the “Non-Goals” section and the step-by-step flow 3. Asana’s project brief template—Also love this whole template, particularly the problem statement framework 4. Intercom’s story template—Love the simplicity, while still having everything you need to get started 5. Product Hunt’s PRD template—Love the way it begins (Who, Why, What), though a bit long 6. Adam Waxman’s PRD template (Design…”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.