No matter who you are or how big you hope to grow your business, figuring out what product to build and what services to offer is a huge challenge. Starting a business takes a huge leap of faith. Given that you could be doing many, many things with your time, how do you decide what to do and what’s really a great idea? This project template will help you do just that.

You’ve validated your startup idea but how do you turn an exciting idea into a functional, thriving business? Follow this step-by-step guide to launch your startup and keep it running strong. This template will also help you make strong connections and find supporters who can help you navigate the wild startup world.

Every company wants to release the best possible product, as smoothly as they can, but understanding what the leanest possible solution that will deliver the most value can be a daunting task. This template will help your company execute effective pre-launch, launch, and post-launch efforts of any new product MVP.

Done effectively, release management planning increases the number of successful releases and reduces quality problems. Productivity, communication, and coordination are improved, and the organization can deliver software faster. For major releases we suggest taking a step back and approaching the new release as a ‘mini-product’ in of itself.

This project template first guides teams to construct an initial release plan which is understood to be rough. It must be detailed enough only to get things started, by predicting that the project will deliver enough return on investment to more than pay for it. The template then helps teams use agile by creating smaller release plans at the start of each iteration.

Developing a clear innovation strategy for your organization is critical to driving sustained and successful innovation. An innovation strategy creates alignment on innovation efforts across different teams and functions, any number of whom might otherwise perceive innovation goals differently. This project template will help you create a clear innovation strategy for your organization.

Incubation enables companies to create strategic innovations, but the best incubation approaches have been designed for startups. This template applies those same approaches, in a corporate context, to allow companies to execute on opportunities that stretch strategic boundaries, providing room to experiment in a non-deterministic, non-linear way.

A hackathon is a competitive event in which teams of designers, developers, and subject matter experts collaborate to create solutions for a specific problem within a defined time frame. Our online hackathon template enables companies to engage their employees simultaneously across different geographies to solve a problem or drive innovation.

Establish and document a direction – by assessing where you are and where you’re going.

Construct the best understanding of the customer and their demands to solidify your problem/opportunity statement.

Empathise with your expected target audience to figure out their biggest pain points they experience, using the ‘Jobs-to-be-done’ framework.

Determine the factors that will make the business opportunity a success. Explore the main focus of the business opportunity along with the alternative paths it could follow.

Produce early, inexpensive, and scaled down versions of the solution or concept in order to reveal any problems with the current design.

Take your first shot at designing version of a solution with just enough features to provide feedback for future development.

Take your early MVP concept on the road to see how the market reacts.

Based on feedback to date, design a version of your solution with just enough features to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future development.

Plan an initial small-scale implementation that is used to prove the viability of the solution.

Track the progress of your pilot programme to best inform your plans moving forward.

Validate your riskiest assumption and build a product which the consumer actually wants. The entrepreneur and the product manager releases an MVP to learn if their prospective product fits in the market.

Predict as many dangers and problems as possible; and plan, organise and control activities so that the project is completed as successfully as possible in spite of all the risks.

Control the transition period to smooth the change curve and close the gap between project phase and operations/business-as-usual.

Distil your experiences from the project that should be actively considered in future activities.

Explore how your concept can add value outside of the core solution.

Broaden your business thinking. Use the strength of partnering.

During the development of a new solution, build and structure ongoing relationships with suppliers, customers, users and partners.

Discovery is a journey of definition. This is when goals, expectations for success, and preliminary requirements are given measurable form.

Release planning is longer-term planning used for new products, major software releases, or when providing more context to agile iteration planning.

Determine how much of the backlog (or new items) you can commit to delivering during an upcoming Iteration. Understand why you are developing features.

Run tests on insights gleaned from the latest iteration to make changes gradually and that are evidence based.

An opportunity to inspect your latest sprints and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next iteration or sprint.