Ditch The Traditional Career Pathway
Consider a Growth Pathway instead to retain and elevate your product team.
A Growth Pathway supports individuals in developing their capabilities, influence, and impact, regardless of whether a promotion is in sight. It recognises contribution, not tenure; progress, not position.
Be Launch Ready
Rolling out a new product or feature shouldn’t feel like crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. The Pre-Launch Readiness Review Template gives your team a clear, repeatable framework to ensure Product, Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success are aligned, informed, and ready to launch with confidence.
A build vs. buy decision fundamentally revolves around assessing whether the necessary technical capabilities for your product can be fulfilled by an external solution or if they need to be developed internally to address specific requirements.
A seemingly straightforward question often uncovers a multitude of complexities, particularly when evaluating which approach—building or buying—will most effectively position your product for sustained success in the market.
Know where your product stands. Act with purpose.
Every product and every feature moves through a lifecycle. But if you don’t know what stage it’s in, you’re guessing, not managing. This template helps you bring clarity to your portfolio so you can make better decisions about where to invest, scale, tweak, or sunset.
Use this tool to map the current maturity of your product or features and uncover the right next move.
The Brainmates Product Talent Planning Template is a codified process for strategically planning your product team capabilities. This template helps product team leaders to understand their current & future capability needs and put in place concrete actions to secure the people capabilities they need to deliver sustainable product success.
Whether you are building a new team or looking to augment a current team, strategically planning product team capabilities will support building a team that is not only high-performing, but future ready. Without a strategic talent plan, you are gambling with the most important asset your organisation has – your people.
Download the template and an illustrative example of how to apply the template to your team. Also checkout the Brainmates Talent Map and Product Capability Assessment, as an initial step in your planning.
If you only choose one tool to rely on in your role as a Product Manager, let it be the Idea Pad. This powerful tool prompts you to consider four key questions—each designed to hone your thinking, refine your approach, and set the foundation for exceptional product management.
The Idea Pad isn’t just for you. It’s also a collaborative tool that brings your stakeholders into the conversation, enabling you to uncover diverse insights and perspectives essential for product success. By focusing on these core questions, the Idea Pad guides you through the ideation process, aligning your team around the target market and their key challenges.
As Product Leaders, managing relationships with diverse stakeholders is a critical skill—yet it can often feel overwhelming. To bring clarity and direction, we created the Managing Stakeholders Template, a structured tool to help you thoughtfully approach stakeholder engagement.
This template simplifies your stakeholder management landscape by organising it into three distinct groups:
The Value Driver Tree (VDT) is a powerful tool for identifying and showcasing the business benefits your product delivers. By engaging with teams across the organisation and asking key questions, you’ll uncover valuable insights into the costs and benefits associated with your product.
Once complete, the VDT becomes a visual tool that helps you communicate your product’s value to the organisation in a clear, compelling way. It fosters alignment, strengthens business cases, and demonstrates how your product contributes to achieving strategic goals.
